Secret Chiefs 3

Long a purveyor of genre splicing and cultural convergence, Trey Spruance of Secret Chiefs 3 has carved a niche in the American music scene that few co-inhabit.

His meticulous compositions span a vast spectrum of sound, ranging from Indian to Spaghetti Western and surf to death metal, and Spruance, best known for his work in Mr. Bungle, sought no exception to aurally cross over on the Chiefs’ 2005 release, Book of Horizons (Web of Mimicry).

That album gave birth to a series of Chiefs subsets. These factions, all still under the greater SC3 umbrella, are distinguished by their lineups, styles, and meanings; The Electromagnetic Azoth, for example, is a percussion-heavy union that serves as a central nervous system of sorts for the rest.

In Spruance’s cosmological context, the symbol for The Electromagnetic Azoth — a colorful, intertwined image of light and dark peacocks and their brilliantly colored feathers — has a dual nature and represents Caduceus, the double-snaked staff of Greek god Hermes. It may seem needless to go these lengths of symbolism, but for the masterful composer/guitarist, it’s all part of the bigger picture.

“It is essentially rooted in the Pythagorean understanding of the universe,” he said of the designs. “This isn’t really something for an academic repository, where we just stroke our chins. These are fundamental realities that can be articulated. The mythological elements are subservient to the symbolism that relates to my understanding of the fundamental Pythagorean principles.”

“It might seem intimidating that [songs are] in 19/16 or 19/15 — they are in these weird, challenging time signatures — but not really, not once you realize that these are ratios.” – Trey Spruance

As for the music, much of what Spruance writes lies outside of the Western school. His near-orchestral works, often both beautiful and haunting, evoke classical Indian scores. Influenced as much by composers R.D. Burman and Ananda Shankar as Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann, Spruance spends a great deal of time alternating scales.

“All of Western music is based on subdivisions and increments,” he said. “There are other ways to think about rhythm that have more life to them. I feel like that’s an area to help us reconnect to a more primal sense of what rhythm is. Because rhythm is ratio — it isn’t fucking increments.”

And more challenging than teaching the arrangements, Spruance found, was freeing minds from the Western structure.

“We spend more time unlearning the grid than we do actually learning the tunes, and once you unlearn the grid, learning the tunes becomes pretty fucking easy,” he said. “It might seem intimidating that they’re in 19/16 or 19/15 — they are in these weird, challenging time signatures — but not really, not once you realize that these are ratios.”

Somehow, he finds the time to create on top of teaching it all. In addition to forthcoming Secret Chiefs 3 album Book of Souls, due this fall, Spruance will put out a retrospective disc titled Path of Most Resistance and record a Masada release for John Zorn that will coincide with curatorial duties for Zorn’s New York club, The Stone, in July. With plans for full-length releases from subgroups Ishraqiyun, Ur, The Holy Vehm, and The Electromagnetic Azoth, it’s a wonder that Spruance gets any sleep at all.

– Story by Scott Morrow, photo by Casey Sachen