There are a few names that come up in interviews with Mike Pride: John Cage, Glenn Branca, Max Roach, John Zorn, Boredoms, Messiaen, Eric Dolphy, Joe Morris, Nels Cline, Anthony Braxton...are you seeing the pattern? These are creative outsiders (even in their circles) known for sparking shifts in the musical universe. Pride has been a member of legendary punkers MDC (aka Millions of Dead Cops aka Millions of Dead Children � I only know the long form of the former as it was a badass sticker to put on one's skate deck in high school), part of the cast of Fushitsusha with Keiji Haino, played in the 77 Drummers "Boadrum" concerts, worked in trio with guitarist Mary Halvorson and bassist Trevor Dunn, and all the hot reed and horn players (Nate Wooley, Kirk Knuffke, Peter Evans). Searching for his performances on YouTube show related links out to as much metal as jazz.

For Drummer's Corpse, Pride gathered a host of drums, gongs, a guitar (himself on organ, myriad percussion, nose flute) and an incongruous group to, after a few short minutes of contemplative reflection, blitzkrieg for a half hour. In theory it's a simple construction: six chords, each held for five minutes, shift. But saying that and hearing the work is the difference of seeing a tornado from fifty or three miles away. There is an overwhelming amount of information here, and per the origins of the piece (Pride began contemplating the creation after a fire destroyed his apartment), it is an aural bring-up and zealous exorcism of violent feelings to move on. The shrieks and howls and growls sound somewhere between shamanistic spasms, tent revivalists and Deathcore vocalists; in the score, drummers are instructed to begin when "a female performance artist comes up and makes uncomfortable eye contact"; tight, nimble metric modulations are met with freeform blasts to build a bomb that only resolves in the last ten seconds. For the second track, "Some Will Die Animals"� guitarist Chris Welcome and Pride (on drums) ramble across Eivind Opsvik's winding double bass drone akin to walking up a darkened circular staircase. Twice, the ensemble becomes a backdrop for a curious vocal recitation canon of randomized text about "UVA, the United Vagina Association", "biologic song animals", "alien identify birds", "Osaka, Japan", "pew pew pew!" etc. that flows across the stereo spectrum with a multiplicity of characters, accents, moods, genders and fervor; intense as the first work in skew, it's a strange juxtaposition that makes you pause and check to see if your iPod advanced a track.

Pride's depth and breadth of musicology can't (and shouldn't) be labeled, and he's comfortable enough in his own skin to absorb and remix influences into his own journey. He writes, "I would like to create work that empowers people from all walks of life � there are many ways to make you feel good, and it doesn't have to sound like Nelly or Xenakis to do that." Respect.