Bruce Lamont Talks About ‘Corrections House’ Project

By Andrew Bansal

Corrections House, the new project bringing forth the collaborative efforts of Scott Kelly of Neurosis, Mike IX Williams of Eyehategod, Sanford Parker of Minsk and Bruce Lamont of Yakuza, released their debut full-length album ‘Last City Zero’ via Neurot Recordings in late 2013 and followed it up with tours through the US East Coast and Europe. To begin the new year, they embarked on a West Coast trek and absolutely crushed the Echoplex in Los Angeles with a brilliantly intense performance. I sat down with Bruce Lamont a few hours before the show to discuss this project, his involvement in it, future plans and other things. Enjoy the conversation below.

Bruce, good to see you again, man. It’s been a while! We’re at the Echoplex today. What’s been your experience. Have you played here before, personally?

Good to see you as well, man! No, I’ve never played here before but it’s nice because Jackson the monitor guy is the old bass player for Yakuza, so he works here and another friend of mine Drew does production here, so it’s all Chicago people and it’s kind of fun. It’s like a family affair. But it’s the first time for me here and I like it so far. It’s very cool.

As for Corrections House, you guys started out recently and played a few shows last year. This week you’re on a West Coast run. How have the live shows been for the band, overall?

It’s been amazing, and this band has kind of developed through the live shows. To give you a really quick summary on how the band came together, Scott, Mike and myself had wanted to do a solo tour together, with Mike doing some readings, Scott doing his solo music and me doing my solo music, and we discussed doing a collaborative thing at the end of the show. So we had already booked a tour as such, we wrote a couple of songs and had Sanford Parker record them. We talked to him and he said he had his solo thing as well with his electronic stuff, and he wanted to do the show with us and be like a fourth member. The studio wiz that he is, he totally pulled it together, so we wrote two songs in the studio and then put a 7″ out called ‘Hoax The System”. We toured on that and basically developed music on the road, a lot of improvisational things going on back and forth. We had some time off on that first tour. Mike lives on Phil Anselmo’s property, and Phil let him use his studio for a day-and-a-half. We got a lot of stuff done down there, which was great, and then just pieced stuff together to get this full-length that we released at the end of November. Obviously, having an engineer in the band helps a lot, specially when you’ve got two guys from Chicago, one in New Orleans and one in Oregon. It makes it a lot easier to work.

That’s cool man. I was going to ask you about the improvisational aspect of the live shows which you mentioned. Now that you’ve released the album, is it hard to actually keep to what you recorded or do you play it differently?

Yeah, it’s a different kind of set, now that we have those songs written, recorded and released. We’re focussing more on that on this run, and we just went to Europe for a couple of weeks and did the same thing there as well. So we’re actually playing songs. There’s some leeway within the music itself, but as far as the way we did the East Coast run, it’s not like that anymore. But fortunately, we’re playing Roadburn this year. We’re actually playing two nights, where one night is going to be exactly the same set you’ll see here tonight, and then we’re going to do a second night in a smaller room where we’re going to do the solo sets. So we’re pretty excited to bring that back. We don’t ever want to lose that element, but we’re already playing an hour and ten minutes with this set, and if we add the solo stuff, it will be like three hours. We don’t want to kill anybody with all that (laughs). But yeah, all four of us really dig both aspects of the band, so we want to make sure that we continue to do that.

Do you plan to do the solo stuff in America too, provided that these Corrections House shows go well?

Yeah, I think we’ll do that eventually. While doing the solo sets we had actually developed songs for the record, just by playing. Mike doing a reading and Scott singing with me playing sax behind it, it all happened when we were doing the solo sets. So yeah, I think we will, in some capacity. The last track on the Last City Zero record ‘Drapes Hung By Jesus’ is basically a condensed version of how we morphed together playing-wise with the solo stuff. It all came from there, so we’re still getting those elements, it’s just not being documented and we try to adhere to the recordings as opposed to just running free with it as much.

You mentioned Roadburn, which must be the biggest thing for the band at this point. I cannot think of a show more perfect for Corrections House.

Oh yeah, we’re super-excited. We actually just got offered for the Roskilde Festival in Denmark as well, so that’s going to be another really amazing festival in Europe. Our recent run in Europe went very well and opened up a lot of exciting opportunities for us. But yeah, Roadburn, greatest festival ever.

Have you played it before with other projects?

Yeah, Sanford and I played it with Minsk in 2009 and Yakuza played there in 2011.

Talking of your other projects, compared to all those, what are you doing differently in this band that you haven’t been able to do in other bands? Is there anything like that or is it just more of a collaborative effort?

Well yeah, it’s more about who you’re collaborating with. The inspiration for doing anything differently from my other bands is because of who I’m working with in this band. My approach is still pretty much the same. I’m only playing baritone-2 saxophone tonight. Normally I was playing baritone-10 on the records but just feasibly couldn’t make that happen. I sing a little differently, a little mellower, breathier and close-mic. I’ve been experimenting with that in my other projects anyway. But I’m thinking more about melody with the horn. I don’t want it to be all noise stuff, and it’s rather just complementary melody to go with what’s already happening within the core of the song.

Since you guys are all busy with bigger projects of your own, is the idea of this band to do short tours like the ones you’ve been doing so far?

I don’t know, I can speak for all four of us when I say that we really like this band. We enjoy each other’s company and we enjoy collaborating together. Obviously, Neurosis is always going to be Scott’s first priority and the same goes for Mike with Eyehategod, but we want to make Corrections House a higher priority, may be more than we ever thought, because we really, really dig it. Sanford and I have been best friends for years, so for him and I to hang out everyday is just business as usual. But Scott and Mike are awesome guys as well and everybody brings something unique. There’s history, there’s a lot of road stories and it’s pretty cool. We all love music so much that we’re naturally able to bring all these different musical elements to the crew.

Bruce Lamont @ The Echoplex, 01/05/14 - Photo by Andrew Bansal

Aside from Yakuza and Corrections House, do you have any other musical ambitions, or plans for starting any new projects this year?

Yeah, we’re working on another Yakuza record right now. We’d like to do some more shows. I have demoed solo work ready to go for another record and I will see when that can be possibly done. I have a band called Bloodiest and we did a record on Relapse in 2011. We’re actually ready to record our second album and I really want to push that a lot harder too. Then there’s Circle Of Animals which is Sanford and I doing more electronic-based stuff which kind of helped this Corrections House thing happen. We’re going to do a record too and Fade Kainer from Batillus is joining the band, along with Dallas Thomas who’s in Pelican now. So yeah, I’m already keeping busy.

That’s a lot to keep track of!

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s January, so this is Led Zeppelin touring season. So my Led Zeppelin 2 tour starts off next week too. Got to pay for all these crazy projects somehow, you know. (laughs)

Of course, man. But based on what you just said about your various projects, I would just like to end this interview with one final question. How many projects do you think a musician can actually handle, doing complete justice to every one of them?

I don’t know, I’m testing the boundaries right now! Mike is too, and we all are in a sense. But that’s the thing I was going to say. I definitely don’t want to neglect anything, and in particular, you’ve got to know where you’ve come from. Yakuza is my thing and that’s my priority in a lot of respects. During the last couple of years my head was involved in so many other things that I don’t want to forget how important Yakuza is. The guys in that band mean everything to me. I don’t have anything else going on in my life. I’m in seven bands. I have no wife and no kids but I’ve got seven bands to feed (laughs). That’s kind of the path I chose. But I try to be pretty mindful with keeping a balance. I don’t want anything to fall by the wayside, not intentionally. But when I hit the wall, I’ll send you a message and let you know!

Related – Gig Review: Corrections House Devastate The Echoplex 

Visit Corrections House on the web:
facebook.com/CorrectionsHouse

Comments

comments