Real Horror Show: Their Style
On October 31st of 2019, under a waxing crescent of the moon, A Salt Lake band, “Real Horror Show”, released their debut single Truncation/Guillotine. Their song begins with a rhythmic pulsing in a filmy haze of static like you’ve found yourself outside an old archaic dwelling with a questionable host coaxing you in. There are voices inside that you can’t quite make out, but as the song goes on you go on, and you get closer to this sinister imitation of something not quite comfortable, but familiar. Then, like a lobotomy, a thunderous piano suddenly starts in synch with manic laughter and you’re in the world of Real Horror Show.
The poet Charles Bukowski once said in a poem called “Style”, “To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it/ to do a dangerous thing with style is/ what I call art”. The music of Real Horrorshow is not identifiable as a genre because of their experimentality and various background each musician brings to the project at hand. With such collaboration, style is abundant. Salt Lily magazine met up with Ethan Dillingham (guitar), Chris Slater (vocals), and Alex Cutler (vocals/guitar) to talk about their initial project and things to come.
Q: Where did you get the influence for your band’s name (Real Horror Show)?
Alex: ‘A Clockwork Orange’. It’s a phrase that’s used in the movie as well as the book by the main character.
Q: The main character is named Alex as well Huh?
Alex: It is, but it doesn’t have anything to do with anything. The phrase “real horrorshow” is something the main character says to refer to things that he likes or especially gory things. In general, I thought that always was a good band name, even from the first time I saw the movie I just kept it in my band stash or whatever.
Q: What sort of bands do you listen to for inspiration or influence?
Ethan: Just, in general, we like Russian Circles production, just because they are very huge sounding. They were one of the bands that I saw live, and they made me want to perform live as well because I saw them when I was a kid.
Alex: I was inspired by a lot of prog-rock bands; King Crimson, Yes, and the old version of Genesis before Steve Hacket left. I went from there and I transitioned to progressive metal of the ’90s. I have always been a fan of jazz and jazz fusion as well. Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of hardcore, punk, and garage rock. I pretty much try to keep my paletas full as possible there was a point where I listened to a band that I haven’t heard of every day. I did that for a long time. Because I have an obsessive personality, so that’s something I latched onto in one point in my life.
Chris: I grew up on the east coast during a time when hardcore and punk were prominent. So ever since I was a young boy, I positioned myself in the hardcore scene, and that’s part of where I get my vocal take from in this project specifically. So, I turn their death and thrash metal influence and I turn it into something that I like.
Q: Would you give yourself a specific genre if you had to, or do you feel like you want to do something different?
Alex: It’s difficult to brand ourselves as anything yet because it’s such a new project. We just started writing music at the beginning of October. We released Truncation and Guillotine on Halloween like three weeks after we had written the song. So that single has such a wide range to it that I want to dive into each side of that. So whatever it ends up being, that’s what it ends up being, but for now, people are calling us post-hardcore, or post-metal. We were featured in Bandcamp as “experimental”, “Dark-folk”, “chamber-music”, and “chamber-metal” which was interesting because there were only like five other bands that were labeled that way on Bandcamp.
Q: Do you have an artistic agenda?
Chris: I wouldn’t say that we have an agenda just yet. As far as those singles go, I think we’ve mapped out an idea for a character (thanks to Alex) that struggles with anxiety, and a dual personality. Throughout the two songs, technically it was supposed to be one but we split it up for convenience, you can hear how much agony the character was going through, and it was really fun to write that way.
Q: We saw your new video for “Guillotine”, and we wanted to know what your process was for making it?
Alex: There wasn’t any hidden agenda or subliminal messaging in our music video. It’s not supposed to be a jab at anyone in particular. It was just something we thought would be a fun Halloween music video. Also, I am such a sucker for super edited, or chopped up video clips like that. My girlfriend is the one who made the video for us with the idea to take old Mormon propaganda videos that she found on YouTube, they were from like the ’70s, and I was so excited that she did that for me! It was just a lot of fun, maybe a little bit shocking, but that’s fine.
Q: We noticed that there were other artists that you collaborated with, who were those artists?
Alex: So currently the core members of the real horror show include Chris, Ethan, and me. Our single is a studio project. We will have a lot of different people collaborating with us on the studio project. We have Brain Fell from Gloe on drums. On Bass, we have Eli Freebairn who also plays Bass for Bad Charm and Wulf Blitzer. We had Courtney Lane Spaulding on piano. Grace Gatlin on flute. ZJ Lee was on the violin and Scott Wasilewski on cello.
The Ensemble track on Truncation was tracked all life with overdubs of piano parts, violin parts, as well as cello parts. The main take had a piano, cello, violin, and flute all playing in the live room at Archive Recordings, which is actually where I work.
I think the one thing that is important to note about the single, in general, is that we are a pure analog band in our recording and mixing processes. I track through the console onto a two-inch twenty-four-track tape machine, and then we mix it on the console, and the only time the computer is on is at the very end basically to print the track. We do this because we want to get the weirdest effects possible in the recording process. That is a Real Horrorshow in a nutshell.”
