If you haven't heard the sound of Denver's Everything Absent Or Distorted, then you aren't listening very hard—with your ears, head, or heart. This eight piece group folds into their music the sounds of life, loss, struggle, and love... x 8. In other words, it's as big as it is broad, and earnest as it is encompassing. And it needs to be heard. Gigbot wrangled the band into the Meadowlark as they prepared for their most recent effort, The Great Collapse, and their CD Release Show at the Gothic Theatre.

Interview by Cause=Time.

Interview by Julio Enriquez at Cause=Time (C=T) / Photos by Todd Roeth.

C=T - How did you guys meet?

EAOD - Some of us met in Denver though Craigslist. It was kind of a rotating band . Some of the guys knew each other from college or some were in a band from before. But for a while there, we were kind of going through a rotating band night, it was a very random thing, but then, eventually, it got whittled down to eight people. It wasn't necessarily a band of eight people, but more of us getting together on different nights playing music. Which eventually turned into a real band where it was an eight member solid feel.

C=T - Are you guys looking for a new members?

EAOD - Always. Robert is our newest member and he's been with the band for over a year. He plays in another band, Rabbit is a Sphere. He was kind of a kindred spirit and we thought it was a good fit. But we are always accepting resumes.

C=T - Who checks the resumes?

EAOD - We all do. There definitely has to be photos. Whatever they post over on the Casual Encounters is a good thing too.

C=T - The Great Collapse is the title of your newest album. Is the title a metaphor for love, life, and/or business?

EAOD - I think as any artist will say, we want the listener to define what the album means. Take for example, the first time you take a breath, your lungs collapse. There's great collapses like the economy, and that's pretty important. All we mean is that anything meaningful in this world, musical or non-musical, is bound to take a great collapse. We want this album for listeners to make it their own. We don't want to take a colonial approach to music where we want you to think we're political, romantic, or aesthetic. That's the beauty of music, you get to take it and make it your own.

C=T - You guys took about two years to record your new album. Why so long?

EAOD - (group chuckles) We think it might have been ten years.

C=T - What did you guys do differently this time around on the new album?

EAOD - We spent a great deal more in the studio. From last time where we did a six song EP type thing where we were learning on the job. Andy, who's an amazing recording engineer, was learning while on the job as well. We all came out pleased with Soft Civil War, but still cognizant of the fact that these songs are a lot more layered, more nuanced, more tracks, more people. It's a bigger piece of art. We took our time. We took our time in case this was the last record the eight of us were going to be apart of for the rest of our lives, it was going to be something we could be proud of twenty years from now and not done a single fucking thing differently. That goes for the tambourine hit on minute 2:22 of that song, but you can overkill that too. You don't want it to be overproduced by any stretch. Maybe the issue with the earlier record, it captured what we were doing, but we realized we can do better. We wanted to make it an all encompassing, grandiose. I don't want to say grandiose, but wider, sleeker, more profound representation of what we do. So we took the time to do that. We could have been doing a long time ago, but it was difficult. This sounds stupid, but for a local Denver band. This isn't about a local band putting out a record, this is our art. We never gave a shit if anybody listened to it or not, but if we would listened to it twenty years from now, that's what matters. So the eight of us were not going to stop until the record sounded a certain way. From the way the horns sounded. The way the drums sounded. We weren't going to accept anything we weren't proud of now or twenty years from now. The eight of us would get together on Saturday mornings and Saturday nights and Wednesday nights. It's not like we went into a studio for a week and squeezed it out. This is the fucking blood, sweat, and tears of our lives. My baby almost died, Andy's father passed away, Joe got married. We had the shit of our lives swirling about, and we captured it as brilliantly as any eight guys with no money and Pro-Tools could capture it. We can't listen to this album and not think about Andy's dad dying, or my baby being born prematurely. Or practicing Saturday morning at 9 o'clock when the night before we were drinking for twelve straight hours. It's inseparable. We talk about the art of our daily lives. It was like a field recording of everything we all went went through in our lives, in the last year. Our friends spouses and friends and we're just proud we captured all of that on record. The field recording of our lives. That's what's more important than any CMJ ranking or any show at the Gothic or any article in Rolling Stone.

C=T - So you guys just don't care?

EAOD - LOUD ERUPTION - This band is narcissistic to a fault. It's narcissistic in a way that an ugly person loves who doesn't know they're ugly, loves them self. Like a mother loves an ugly child. We love the ugly child that is this band. The reason we love this ugly child is that for whatever we have going on in our individual lives, we know we have this band. That's something we can be proud of, we have the interaction amongst the eight of us and it builds us up and makes us stronger.

C=T - Explain The Alchemist in both records and have you read the Alchemist?

EAOD - I guess it gives it a nice coherence where I don't mind revisiting safe songs for years and years. We have a grand total of a dozen songs where we take them a part and build them back up. If you wanted one of those great collapses, it's one of those songs. I love what that song has to say and I would love to play it over and over until I die. We like the idea of alchemy and the nature of all of us getting together playing as hard as we can.

C=T - Is this the year that you guys make it out to SXSW?

EAOD - We will not be making it to SXSW. The week of March 14th - 19th we will be attending the Canadian Music week in Toronto. We got selected to play. We want to play a small tour on our way up there. There's a lot of good cities on the way up there, Omaha, Chicago, Milwaukee or Madison. We could go further east and play New York/Boston area.

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Win tickets to Everything Absent Or Distorted's CD Release Show, where they will perform the blood sweat and tears from their latest release - The Great Collapse - on December 6th, 2008 at the Gothic Theater in Englewood, Colorado.

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