Laugh to Keep From Crying

Puscifer gets ready to bring its eerie theatrical production to the Mother Church

BY P.J. KINZER

After more than 30 years fronting prog-metal icons Tool and more than 20 leading all-star ensemble A Perfect Circle, Maynard James Keenan — in Cher-like fashion, he’s known to most fans simply as “Maynard” — has become something of an elder statesman in the world of heavy music. He has always placed exceptional emphasis on the art of a musical group as a unit, and his bands’ stage shows and music videos have long pushed creative boundaries that many other acts just accept.

Though it’s pretty clear that Keenan and the members of his bands have welldeveloped senses of humor, much of their vivid and imaginative work comes across as extremely serious and overtly dark. A third project, however, brings to the surface a lot of elements that don’t fit into the oeuvres of Tool or APC. Puscifer’s name, with its accent on the “puss,” was dreamed up for a 1995 Mr. Show sketch featuring Keenan and his Tool bandmate Adam Jones, and the project released its first EP in 2007. In Puscifer, Keenan’s main collaborators are multiinstrumentalist extraordinaire Mat Mitchell and British singer-songwriter Carina Round. Together, they cut loose with an array of characters, costumes and bawdy jokes steeped in black comedy. It’s like a cabaret show from an alternate universe where things are even bleaker than they are in ours.

“Wherever we’re making a joke, there’s probably something that’s hard to joke about,” Keenan tells me over the phone. “I think historically, comedy and tragedy go together.”

On Halloween night, Puscifer’s longdelayed tour behind their latest record Existential Reckoning stops at the Ryman, almost two years from the day the album was released. Thematically, the LP focuses on the havoc that living in the Information Age has wrought on us, from our relationships with each other and ourselves to our collective ability to sort out fact, fiction and opinion. Musically, it’s an adventurous mix of sounds leaning toward post-punk and drawing from a wide range of electronic music, presented with peerless skill.

“Mat and Carina are incredible at painting those landscapes and soundscapes,” says Keenan. “Just pick up the album and ignore all the other stuff — and go down a rabbit hole and have fun. We’re definitely a ‘headphones band.’ ”

Existential Reckoning was the result of the hard labor of all three members, spaced between Los Angeles and Keenan’s Arizona winery, Caduceus Cellars, where he spends most of his time off the road. The process of making both an album and a season’s worth of wine is a difficult balance and a unique kind of creativity. Plenty of musicians collaborate from separate locations routinely — and even more learned how to during pandemic lockdown — but not that many are simultaneously responsible for a vineyard.

“I am the winery — at my house,” Keenan explains. “I do it about 150 times a year up here in the bunker with my wife and my friend Tim.” Keenan spent a significant amount of time swapping digital files with Mitchell that became the building blocks of the record. “Mat’s definitely experimenting a lot with various synths and keyboards and patches, and is also an incredible guitar player.”

He compares his creative relationship with Mitchell to that between art-rock guitarist Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, or Marc Ribot’s collaborations with Tom Waits. While many musicians — especially great guitarists — rely on cranked amps and distortion pedals to make their mark heavy and dark, Keenan explains that Mitchell takes a different path, leaning on synthesizers for the heaviness.

The collaborative process generally begins with Keenan spending time absorbing riffs that Mitchell has come up with — playing the recordings in his truck, just letting them cycle through on headphones as he works around the winery. Once riffs have been sorted through, it’s Round’s turn to contribute her voice; then the files land back with Mitchell, who will begin building up layers of synths, bass and guitar. By the time the demos have made the rounds

of the core trio a few times, Puscifer has a pretty good idea of what they’ll be doing in the studio. Keenan appreciates the methodical, intentional nature of the process — “you can digest what’s happening, rather than having to respond in the moment” — and it’s important to have a plan before recording. Most of their opportunities to work together in person are during harvest season. “That’s when Mat is able to come out with Carina,” Keenan says with a great deal of enthusiasm. “And we’re able to work on music during harvest, because there are breaks — even if it’s only an hour break.” Over an extended period, they’ll settle into a routine of Keenan’s morning winery work, a late lunch and evenings spent laying down new tracks, making edits and cleaning up the PLAYING MONDAY, files. During this time, they also map out the OCT. 31, AT THE RYMAN myriad other nonmusical aspects of Puscifer, from music video concepts to their payper-view concert series to developing the characters they (and others in their circle) portray onstage during the shows. With so much effort put into creating a wild and dark theatrical experience on a regular basis, you might expect All Hallow’s Eve to be the band’s favorite time for a show. You might be surprised. “I mean, it kind of sucks. Because we already have characters built and there’s a whole show of us not dressed as us. So you have to make the decision: Do we do other costumes or do we let these people see the show? Because there’s already characters involved. I guess we just have to see.” EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM