Pyrograph goes for literal garage rock on debut album
Plus, Dale Stewart (Capitol Punishment) in conversation with Dave Ewald (Circus Bogus).
Before Pyrograph became rock band, they played dance music under the name The Hype. They did mostly covers, a few originals.
When it came time to start pushing their own music and they needed a new name, the band was taken in by the word pyrography; that is, the artform of burning images onto wood.
“Being from Madera,” says the band’s guitarist Johnny Holiday, “Madera means ‘wood’ in Spanish. The idea to shorten pyrography to pyrograph came from the literal idea that we want to burn a rock scene on to the Central Valley,” he says.
“On to, ‘Wood,’ if you will.”
The band (Holiday, along with his brother David Alexander, Alex Bourdet and Lazarus Uribe) is currently playing in support of a debut album, which it self-released in April.
You can see them June 8 at The Great Room and in July at Powerhouse Pub down in Folsom. This week, I caught up with Holiday (via email) to find out more about Pyrograph.
[Note: Some answers were slightly edited for clarity and flow]
You guys are a rock band, or a heavy rock band, but not a metal band, though there are also some metal elements. So, how would you describe what you do? Also, do straight-up rock bands exist any more?
“We call ourselves a rock band. Plain and simple. There are some heavy/hard rock elements, but we write what we like. And we have to really like it, otherwise we don’t move forward with it.
Our influences vary. Some of us grew up listening to Alice in Chains, Queens of the Stone Age, Audioslave, Nine Inch Nails, while some of us grew up with Spanish music. What we write has to feel right. And sometimes, it can be emotionally draining, to the point where emotions flare.
The rock scene is hard to look at right now.
The last rock band to be unique in their own right in the last decade is Royal Blood, which, really they’re more modern/alternative rock. Straight up grungy sounding rock is hard to come by nowadays.
But, I do see rock music on the rise again and it makes us hopeful that maybe Pyrograph has shown up at just the right time.
Tell us about the new album.
“The album starts with, ‘The Ram,’ which is us paying homage to our father.
The world doesn’t know the story of Ram Garza and his father before him, Ram Garza Sr. If they did, they would be totally shocked.
They had a Spanish group in the early ’70s and performed and connected with the biggest name in Spanish music, most notable, Los Tigres del Norte.
[Note: You can hear Los Filarmonicos De California online through the Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings]
To sum up this very long story, our Garza grandfather was offered one of the biggest record deals at the time by RCA records. He turned it down to not only save his marriage, but because in his words, ‘I found something better.’
He found his faith and God, and became a Catholic.
Because of that decision, our dad was around to meet our mother through a church group that started from our Grandfather. Pyrograph wouldn’t be here today if not for his decision. You can imagine how proud our dad is of our album and the music we are putting out.
We are a self-produced and self engineered band … We spent five months recording in one of the hottest summers in California in a 96-degree garage.
We set up our studio space and went for it. We did the same thing with our EP, ‘Creatures of Instinct’ back in 2018. We learned a lot from that and decided we could record a full length album by ourselves. It saves a lot of studio time you would otherwise have to pay for. There’s no pressure to have to record fast.
We went at our pace, which allowed us to really hone what we wanted each and every song to do for the album.
The opening track, is the garage becoming self aware. ‘The first noise that I heard was, a beating drum from The Ram, this was his place, still, I remain.’ ”
Did you really use a vacuum hose to record part of the vocals (as seen 1.8 million times on TikTok)? Where’d you pull that technique?
“Yes, that is true. It was used to record ‘Third Leg’ and is on the finished product for you to listen to.
The idea of practical effects always seems much more fun than to just turn to plugins or automated sounds through studio magic in a computer. We always think of ways to get a practical sound that fits into our songs and this idea just worked out.
David was always singing through fans, space heaters, weird objects, so see if he could get a certain noise. The vacuum hose had a really cool sound that ended up being recorded with three condenser mics half-mooned around while David swung the vacuum hose back and forth to get the swirling sound.”
Pyrograph’s debut album is out now across digital platforms.
Dale Stewart + Dave Ewald, in conversation
Earlier this month, Dale Stewart released a video conversation with Dave Ewald.
Stewart operates Stage Dive Records and is an archivist and historian of Fresno’s punk music scene. Ewald was the bass player for the infamously insane band Circus Bogus.
The video clocks in at just under 10-minutes and has some interesting insight on Ewald’s introduction into music (playing saxophone in elementary school band) and first forays into punk rock (via the underground radio show Maximum Rock and Roll).
“It was like, I duno, punk rock church … the punk rock evangelist Tim Yohannan comes on the air every Tuesday night, to give you his sermon about people making noises in their garage.”
It’s seven minutes in before the pair really starts talking about Ewalds’ pre-Circus Bogus bands (Audio Terrorism, Cocktail Waitresses from Hell and Black Art) and the video ends just as they’re starting to really set the scene.
It feels like there needs to be a part two, at least.
Back in 2022, Stewart had a similar video conversation with Nate Butler, that I had hoped would become a regular thing.
Check out all of Stewarts videos (and music) on his Youtube channel.
That’s it for this week. Remember you can now hear me on the Homegrown Show Sundays at 8 p.m. on New Rock 104.1 FM. Follow my other writing at The Fresno Bee. If you have anything you think I need to be looking at or listening to, feel free to let me know: jtehee@gmail.com