A Masochist’s Perspective

Josh is a young talent with a clever way with words. It has been a pleasure seeing him at our shows over the past year. He surprised Emily & I with this piece he wrote on LAVOLA a few weeks ago and gave me his blessing to post it here. Thanks so much, man.

Walking Through the Black Sea of Trees
By Josh Sczykutowicz

Let me tell you a little bit about a Florida band called Lavola.

Lavola is a word that doesn’t really mean anything, but it sounds right, and it sounds fitting to the music it creates. Lavola wasn’t really a band at first; it was a name Julian Cires gave to his work as a musician. Lavola had a demo EP that got a CD release which you will never find. It was called Black Sea of Trees, named after a forest in Japan known both for its stunning beauty and its frequency of suicides which take place inside of its reaching leaves and wanting caverns.

Lavola followed it up with another release that’s too short to be an album and too substantial to be an EP, since dubbed an albumette. It’s called Leaving Paris, and every song on it lays out an emotional groundwork that you might call defining, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Songs are titled Masochist, songs are titled This City Loves You, and songs are titled I’m Leaving Paris, a name that brings to life imagery of fleeing a city known for love and one which, accordingly, loves you.

Despite Paris being known for its Tower and old world streets, the ghosts of Floridian coasts haunt the lyrics. “As the ocean’s tides swallowed up my face, all I saw was you, covered up in lace; Dear God, how you feel so fake, a porcelain doll barely keeping sane,” Cires both whimpers and screams, alternatingly defiant and succumbing. “I was the one to find, under the ocean’s tide, life, life, life,” he shouts after a series of thunderous guitars and sweeping distortion like crashing waves give way to this declaration. Lavola often finds life in the depths of it.
“Farewell, my friends, I’m fleeing Paris for fairer weathers, I knew no better, my heart’s grown trees,” Cires sings, first with an energetic pulse, until, by the end of the eight-minute-plus epic, it’s reduced to a soft sound of defeat, of leaving love behind and facing whatever life there is once the ocean swallows you whole.

And the thing is, you can’t really put Lavola into a genre. Lavola is too raw to be called technical; Lavola is too technical to be called punk. Guitars crash and sing; throats shred with deep screams and ascend with falsetto notes of beauty. Lavola will call itself an orchestral balancing act, given the chance. Lavola didn’t start out with a violinist, but Lavola was always made for one. Lavola writes songs about love and romance, of heartache and tumultuous relationships, and never much cares for the sexual part of it, coming from the chest and not the crotch like so many other acts.

If violins and romance are in the DNA of Lavola, orchestral love and classical beauty, then it is no surprise that the duo Julian Cires and violinist Emily Dwyer co-write all of Lavola’s work from everything post-Leaving Paris. Before and after shows they can be found sitting at the bar or standing near a merch table together, sipping off of a beer that seems to belong to neither, rather belongs to both, and when they hand it off from one set of fingers to the next, it is without thought. If you say something, they will take a moment to notice, and finally smile, and later they will harmonize, sharing a microphone when the venue only has one.

Lavola started out with just Julian in a bedroom, playing acoustic guitar and catching the fair winds of a bedroom fan in the background of soft interludes and tales of Holocaust-laced imagery, miscarriages, Victorian beauty and bound feet, but if you hear their music, and if you see them live, and if you happen to stick around to share a drink or trade a story, you will see that Lavola was never really a solo act, it just had yet to find its second half. When Emily Dwyer entered in, a hole not known became filled, and suddenly that hole was clear everywhere in the releases before her arrival.

And after her arrival, the first full-length Lavola record seemed to be uncovered from the snow that its title was buried in, called This Book Is My Cowardice. The CD comes in an unassuming black cloth sleeve, artwork both visual and audial, both full of color and muted shades of beauty concealed within. If you were lucky, you could grab a test pressing for the vinyl release with a print of handwritten lyric sheets for the album closer, Please Excuse the Blood, in which Cires can be found singing, “Please don’t listen now, these words are for sale, Mark up this failure before the ink dries up; I promise, lover, nothing’s really real, are you fading or are you pulling back?”

If you get the LP, and you turn the sleeve over, beneath the track listing you will find a cornstarch-coated Cires and Dwyer embraced in one another’s arms. If you flip through the CD’s booklet you will see the two with hands held amidst an empty field beneath a Florida sky so covered in clouds it could be considered classic geography. But neither is found fading, neither found pulling back. The cover art depicts a faceless couple, back turned, examining distant mushroom clouds, world ahead engulfed in flame.

Across the songs that expand on all of the themes the past two releases laid down with lyrical ease and sonic attention, somehow always a raw, pure event with carefully crafted string sections, samples and loops all at once, you’ll find their voices intertwined. You’ll hear violin strings played beneath the current of sparse piano and distorting guitar. You’ll find lyrical landscapes where hearts shed leather guards to give in, where Jesus Christ holds loaded guns to fucking heads, where a woman flings her lovers into the sun and Julian and Emily’s echoing voices ask you to go to sleep before the bombs echo defilement.

If you go to live shows, you might find them doing fifteen minute long Radiohead covers to packed crowds that they’ve collected across the south Florida scene in front of video screens full of color and swirling imagery, or you might walk into a bar in Orlando where the only decorations onstage are white Christmas lights wrapped around mic stands, where Julian punishes his acoustic guitar and Emily treats her violin like a thing of natural beauty. If you stick around, you can sometimes see Julian restring the charcoal-shaded instrument strapped across his back, strings snapping from how hard he strums, playing extra songs for fans who ask. Newly recorded demos get played behind the orange-glow of car dash consoles when the venues close for the evening.

In the performance rooms of a DIY home-turned-art-den, or beneath blinding stage lights, in front of neon signs that wave with changing colors and light their skin, Emily’s bleach blonde hair reflecting digital blue and green and Julian’s raven black bangs unchanged, or screaming into microphones as people jump into one another and walk toward Julian to record with phones held up, him down on his knees, mic stand ripped to the ground, band unrelenting as he sweats his voice into the chrome, you can find them playing some of the strongest sets in Florida.

If you ask them about the stories behind their songs, you’ll hear about lost loves and literature. They’ll tell you about mixing plants and musicians they know, scattered across the rain-soaked swamplands and urban streets of south-central Florida. You’ll hear about tattoo shops that offer discounts and stories of tech support and call centers, of sadomasochists cashing in their checks and hearts growing trees with roots intertwining. When you leave, and when the ringing in your ears from the speakers three feet from your face subsides, you’ll be sifting through song lyrics and searching for secrets, wanting to paint canvases in watercolor images of hearts sprouting leaves from aortas and ventricles. You’ll hear a song again and know who it’s about this time, or listen to something from Leaving Paris and wonder where the violins went, Emily’s live additions seeming like they were meant to be there all along. There will be outros missing and improvised lyrics you will want to hear and remember, digs at bad sound mixers and references to Charlie Murphy, and you’ll know that you will need to see them again.

I met Julian and Emily at a Nine Inch Nails concert, with The Dillinger Escape Plan opening in West Palm and have been friends ever since. They gave me their album for free; I paid for it later on. In under a year I’ve seen them eleven times, and soon it will be twelve, and I know that there is not a better band to be found in this coastal end of the continent. In their music and in their performances you will find beauty, intensity, passion, meaning, sincerity, and pure talent.

“This tired spirit is just a figment; A void to pacify,” Cires and Dwyer harmonize on the track “Healing Eye”. Lavola is anything but.

Josh Sczykutowicz is a young author from central Florida who’s probably drinking too much coffee. Most of his work can be described as dark, alternative and literary fiction. He has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine, East Jasmine Review and ExFic, among others. You can Like him on Facebook or follow him on twitter and tumblr at http://joshsczykutowicz.tumblr.com/.

We appreciate ya lots, Josh. See you soon.

• Josh Sczykutowicz
• LAVOLA
• Masochists