Subterranean Dissonance Fest

Scarcity

Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz

Scarcity is an experimental black metal band from New York City consisting of composer/ multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-Myers (Glenn Branca Ensemble, Dither), vocalist Doug Moore (Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus), bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause (Sigur Ros, Steve Reich, LEYA) on bass, guitarist Dylan Dilella (Pyrrhon), and drummer Lev Weinstein (Krallice). 

Randall-Myers wrote Scarcity’s debut “Aveilut” while processing the sudden deaths of two people close to him, tracked it while caught in Beijing’s first lockdown of 2020, and finished it while surrounded by the overwhelming plague visuals of New York’s early COVID peak. Back in Brooklyn, vocalist Doug Moore soon found himself in the midst of an equally bleak lockdown experience — living next to a funeral home when New York City was America’s COVID epicenter. From conception through development, tangible death surrounded Aveilut.

The result of such a profound closeness with death is the grief-stricken Aveilut, which takes its name from the Hebrew word for mourning. 72-note octaves, alternate tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena and macro-phrases embody the hugeness of loss, the inexplicable space of death’s void that Randall-Myers faced both on a personal and existential scale. Together with Moore’s gripping vocal delivery and stark lyrics, the album takes the form of a hyperobject, an entity with such vastness and reach that it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend. 

Consisting of a single 45-minute composition, the music is black metal roughly in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Ehnahre – with hefty doses of post-Branca microtonal guitar abuse, and a cinematic scope that draws on Randall-Myers’ work with orchestras. Aveilut’s mathematical abstraction and lyrical focus on the greatness of the void breed raw emotion, attempting to represent a catastrophe, the vastness and inevitability of things outside our control; as well as a direct expression of grief, a kind of requiem. 

“The Promise of Rain”, the group’s sophomore album, is an embodiment of the hard-to-believe truth that burdens are easier to bear when distributed, a realization Randall-Myers grappled with extensively while writing the record. This is a sweat-drenched album about dispersion, about spreading, about the collective relieving of burdens through shared experience: you don’t have to go through everything alone.

When Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut was written in early 2020, Randall-Myers and vocalist Doug Moore never expected to be able to play their songs live. The cathartic experience of playing something that came from a place of isolation out to people in a live setting is the root of the intensity in The Promise of Rain. The Promise of Rain begins where the craziest climaxes of Aveilut end, and is the first Scarcity record to include Tristan Kasten-Krause on bass, Dylan Dilella on guitar and Lev Weinstein on drums. Rather than building density with the quasi-orchestral layering on Aveilut, Scarcity challenged themselves to document what five people in a room could do, recording most of The Promise of Rain in one or two takes, capturing the physical effort and urgency of a live performance.