Baltimore, Maryland's Darsombra aka Brian Daniloski (guitar/bass/vocals) and Ann Everton (synth/vocals/percussion/projections) describe their droning, psychedelic music as “trans-apocalyptic galaxy rock” and have released via numerous labels including Public Guilt, Exile On Mainstream and Translation Loss. The project was founded by moonlighting Meatjack member Daniloski as a solo endeavour named SUCKPiG in 1998, before switching identity in 2005. Video artist Everton started working with Daniloski in 2010, becoming a full member in 2013. Released via their own Pnictogen label, the duo’s new album Dumesday Book is a kaleidoscopic reflection on the weirdness of the pandemic. Here the pair discuss some of the ideas that inform the album, their videos and their unorthodox approach to touring.

Joseph Stannard: You’ve described Dumesday Book as “our mental dreamscape/hellscape of plague times”. A lot of music inspired by the pandemic seems heavily introspective and/or focused on the artist’s immediate environment. Your album on the other hand explores a spectrum of emotion from despair to euphoria. Was it a struggle not to go down an entirely dark path with the new music?

Ann Everton: Our last album, 2019’s Transmission, was pretty dark – well, the first half, at least – so we’d gotten a lot of sturm und drang out of our systems by 2020. Despite all the anxiety of the time, we kept returning to this sense of absurdism, both in music and in life. That seemed to keep us going surprisingly nicely. Plus, we’re both pretty empathic and easily absorb the feelings and mind states of others – so quarantine was a surprisingly creative, nourishing time for us as we just had our own emotions to deal with, as opposed to everyone else’s plus our own. I remember thinking every day, boy, am I glad I have art to cultivate right now. Boy, am I glad I have music.

Brian Daniloski: I’ve put in plenty of time making music with the purpose of “exploring the dark side of humanity” – I put that in quotes because I feel like it’s cliche, especially in the world of heavier music. Yes, horrible things are happening, but wonderful things are happening too, and it seems one-dimensional and not reflective of life’s rich tapestry to only concentrate on the negative. This may sound too woo! for some, but I firmly believe that one manifests one’s reality by where they place their focus. I just don’t care to go down an entirely dark path anymore, artistically or otherwise, because I end up finding myself stuck in a place where the Kurt Cobain solution feels like the only way out, and that just sucks. Don’t get me wrong, I think something like The Cure’s Pornography album is brilliant in its unrelenting vision of bleakness, and I love that album, but I don’t want to live there. I can’t. I want the full immersion experience of life’s joys and horrors.

What kind of sonic evolution does Dumesday Book represent for Darsombra?

Ann: We wrote Dumesday Book with the intention of making a pop album à la Darsombra. Instead of one or two long songs, as we had done on our previous albums, we wanted the new album to host an array of songs, most of which would be less than 20 minutes long – which, for us, is a huge shift in brevity!

Brian: We're always exploring, moving forward, and trying out new things and new sounds. On this album, we’re exploring some new musical dimensions while still maintaining our Darsombra-ness, whatever that means. We’re adding more unexpected ingredients to our sonic gumbo. I hope it’s getting weirder. I just want our music and videos to keep getting weirder.

The single “Call The Doctor” gave me a shot in the arm at a tough time. Was it your intention to deliver a positive message via this track? And who is The Doctor?

Brian: The ecstatic nature of “Call The Doctor” was more an inadvertent result than a direct intention to deliver a positive message. When we wrote it, we were just trying to cheer ourselves up from the initial shockwave of pandemic induced panic/fear/depression/hopelessness.

Ann: “Call The Doctor” was the first song on Dumesday Book to come together, and yes, for us too, it was a positive stimulant to rally us through a tough time. I like to think of it as reflecting that sense of freedom when everything shut down. Yes, there was a sense of terror beneath it all as we were entering a new phase in the development of our species, but there was also this incredible feeling of hidden potential being unlocked, like: and now we have a chance to rewrite the code. Now we have a chance to start anew. It reflects a sense of joy that really was quite unhinged, manic and immediate – the high before the crash.

Who is The Doctor? Well… that’s a pretty subjective concept, but for me, Ann, the doctor is Dr McCoy from Star Trek. We became huge Trekkies during the pandemic! You really can make the Doctor anything you like. Brian likes to think of the Doctor as Dr Love from the Kiss song [“Calling Dr Love”].

Your videos – such as those for “Call The Doctor” and “Gibbet Lore” – look as much fun to make as they are to watch. How do you go about developing the concepts? What hardware/software do you use?

Ann: In the past, when we’ve made a workable demo of a song, traditionally I’d listen to it under the enhancement of some sort of helper substance for developing visual concepts. These days, though, my mind has walked the path of the helper substances enough times that the ideas usually pop into my sober mind fully formed, and any substances I imbibe to help me along with the visualisations tend to just confirm these visions. For example, when I was composing the video to “Gibbet Lore”, I repeatedly kept seeing a scene of a wolf howling on top of a mountain in the moonlight at one specific point in the song, regardless of my mind state. Eat some mushrooms, listen to the song on acid, listen to it stone cold sober, same thing every time – wolf howling on that mountain, so damn it, I knew I had to film something that grabs the essence of a wolf howling on a mountain, whether I liked it or not! Of course, this evolved into ‘dog howling on top of a hill’ but it’s no easy feat to get a hound to howl on command! Same with the loosely interpreted Renaissance-garbed dancers. I’m not a Renaissance fester at all – it’s not an aesthetic I pursue, though I appreciate the care people put into their costumes – but whether I liked it or not, the vision was people having a Feast of Fools and then dying of black plague, so off I went, pursuing said vision. It was a lot of fun!

In a way, though, the “Call The Doctor” scenes were a little easier to realise, because, as I mentioned before, we had really gotten into Star Trek: The Original Series, and its whole visual aesthetic and positivistic future vision. The goal for “Call The Doctor” was simply to make a science fiction video. NASA’s huge online library of common use photographs made me feel like a kid in a candy store, and like a lot of other video artists at the time, I was going berserk with the green screen due to the limitations of lockdown and social distancing. I think we must have had almost 30 people involved in the “Gibbet Lore” video, whereas the “Call The Doctor” video was still in the thick of things, shot in 2020 and 2021, with just a small handful of actors and production assistants, maybe five total, with rapid tests for all.

I usually try to tell a story in the Darsombra videos, but I always want to leave room for the viewer to have a subjective interpretation of the piece. Let’s just say that “Gibbet Lore” is about false optimism during plague times, and “Call The Doctor” is about how every sci-fi narrative is inspired by the wonders of the Earth. I work in Adobe Premiere currently, and occasionally dip back into Final Cut Pro 7 on an older computer if needed for specific effects, like the slit scan Kubrick-ian sequence on “Call The Doctor”. A huge debt of gratitude goes to Douglas Trumbull for inventing the slit scan technique!

You embarked on a ‘secret tour’ in 2021. How did this come about? Did you encounter any difficulties while on the road?

Brian: We love to tour and travel. It’s one of our favourite things to do. We were so bummed when we had to stop touring for over a year while the world figured out how to deal with Covid. We had been talking for years about doing what we would call a ‘Genera-tour’ – a tour where we would just do pop-up shows powered by a small generator wherever and whenever we felt like it, with no agenda, no itinerary, and no expectations of large crowds or making money, just exploring and performing whenever the opportunity presented itself. It seemed like the time was perfect. There were surprisingly few difficulties, possibly because it was pretty loose compared to a usual tour, where there are a bunch of shows, tons of logistics, and a schedule to keep.

Ann: As soon as we scheduled our first shots of the brand new Covid vaccine, we calculated how long until we could travel again – I think it was two weeks after the second shot – and immediately planned a three and a half week road trip to Utah to film scenes for the already in development “Call The Doctor” video. We also booked a couple of outdoor venue shows, one in Kansas City, Missouri, and the other in Dayton, Ohio – but the time was ripe for a ‘Genera-tour’! We’d live broadcast our impromptu performances in the wild when we had cell service, or just film them when we didn’t. “To A Butte In Utah” was of the latter category – no service, no people, no nothing for miles but us and this enormous butte!

We did four generator shows – Lake Ouachita in Arkansas, Diablo Canyon in New Mexico, Factory Butte in Utah, and Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas. All of these locations were very special, significant places, complete with absurd triumphs and amusing follies. At Lake Ouachita, we had no problems playing our show, but our evening campfire the night before was crashed by a few friendly Arkansawyers and a baying hound named George, hot on the trail of some hapless raccoon. Diablo Canyon provided us a beautiful scene for a show, complete with an audience of friends from nearby Santa Fe, that ended just as a fierce windstorm kicked up and threatened to destroy all of our gear. Factory Butte in Utah was a most hospitable spot, allowing us to get five takes of our set, although we were performing on a solid gigantic rock, so when I accidentally dropped my phone less than one metre to the ground, the screen was immediately covered in an intricate spiderweb of shattered glass – oh, and midges, also known as no-see-ums, let us know when that show was over. Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, the last true prairie in the US, was also very chill, beautiful and laidback, but our hikes there after the show were always cut short by bison in our path. You don’t wanna get too close to a bison!

What were the highlights of the tour?

Brian: Our time spent at the butte in Utah where we shot the “Call The Doctor” live video was definitely a highlight for me. We pretty much spent the whole day at that location, and it was something to behold. You could see for miles and miles in all directions and there were these large rocks nearby to climb. It was so remote that we hardly saw another soul the whole time we were there. Although we couldn’t livestream due to the lack of cell service, the location was too awe inspiring to not stop and play some music and shoot a video. During the five takes we shot as the sun was going down, rain and sandstorms threatened to sweep in, and as Ann mentioned, midges started to make their presence known at dusk – you can see me trying to swat them away at some point in the video. We ended up spending the night there and it was just magical. I'll never forget it.

Ann: Living out of the van, truly isolating for all these weeks even though we were technically vaccinated and nominally safe to mix, was pretty delightful, to be honest. I could never be a true van-lifer – I like indoor plumbing a lot – but it was fun to just wander at will, filming as many lunar landscapes as possible, visiting as many hot springs as we could reach, and cooking all sorts of rag-tag meals in our rice cooker, as we moseyed basically to the end of US Route 70 and back. Route 70 is a large interstate that ends in the east practically in our backyard in Maryland, and we’d never seen the other end – that is, until the Genera-tour in 2021! It ends in the middle of nowhere in Utah, near a huge cow-filled meadow with three hot springs in it, with tropical fish swimming about in the springs. One of them is more than eight metres deep! And there’s a cinder cone and lava tubes nearby… my deceased geologist grandfather was smiling upon us as we scrambled around on chunks of obsidian under some meadow at the west end of Route 70 in Utah!

How does playing out in the open compare to playing indoors? Do you have a preference?

Brian: It's always great to be playing outdoors, especially if there’s beautiful scenery. There’s nothing like it, but we’re just as happy playing at a dive bar or a theatre or a house show. Anytime that we get to play our music is a good thing.

Ann: Yes, we love playing shows just about anywhere, but I personally love playing outdoors because I assume it’s easier for aliens to watch us play! Plus, the energy transference you get when you play outside to a really stunning landscape – doesn’t matter if there are people there or not, it’s just such a rush. The gift that keeps on giving – you put joy out to the land, and it gives you joy right back, even if it also tells you when to stop, in the form of midges or dust storms or rain.

Tell me about your tour vehicle, how do you make it comfortable for long treks?

Ann: We drive a Ford Transit 250 cargo van – it’s a contractor vehicle that we outfitted with storage for our equipment, a platform bed with additional storage underneath, an electrical system in the form of an auxiliary battery and an inverter, and insulation to keep it coolish in the warmer months and warm in the cold. The electrical system really has made a huge difference, as we cook our meals in there in a rice cooker, or use it to plug in our computers to watch movies – that was a lifesaver in the spring of 2022 when we caught Covid on tour and had to isolate in the van, in the desert, for nine days!

Brian: That inverter also can power our roadside performances. Life in the van is very cosy.

The post-Covid era – if indeed that’s what we’re in – has presented bands with multiple challenges when it comes to making ends meet. How do you keep going in spite of these difficulties?

Brian: Things have definitely changed. A lot of the indie DIY music network connections that we had methodically amassed and accessed over many, many years didn’t make it through the pandemic, whether it was a promoter or a venue or a band. In many ways it’s like starting from scratch. We keep going because we have no choice – we feel compelled to inflict our weird art on the world.

Ann: We try and keep a positive outlook and remain grounded. Our goal as a band is longevity and sustainability, not fame and fortune (though we appreciate fair compensation for our work). We know our worth as workers, as artists, and as individuals, and we’re surprised and thrilled that we’ve slowly cultivated an audience around the world that want us to do what we do, that like us to do what we do, and that derive as much joy from this genre be damned art/rock as we do. What more could we ask for as artists on this earth? Yes, post-Covid times, or trans-Covid times as it may be, are riddled with uncertainty and it often feels like we have to swim against the current as venues close, promoters step out of the game, and tours carry the unnerving potential to just dry up like piss on the pavement in Death Valley… But we like a bit of a challenge, and what would we do if we weren’t doing this? There’s always the potential for another Genera-tour…

Darsombra’s Dumesday Book is released on 25 August. Read Joseph Stannard's review in The Wire 475, also available to read online with a Wire subscription.