25 in '25: BREAK OF DAWN talk 'Figure Studies in Arsenic and Tears'

25 in '25 is our series of in-depth looks at classic albums hitting their 25th anniversary in 2025, told by the people who created them.

“We were all trying to play beyond our abilities,” says Eric LePore, guitarist of Break of Dawn. “That's where progression happens, and we were definitely those types of people with our instruments.”

Progression is perhaps the word best to describe Break of Dawn’s short, under-celebrated existence. The Rochester, NY band, founded in 1998, started off with a more straight-ahead hardcore sound which, by the time they recorded their EP, Figure Studies In Arsenic and Tears, had morphed into an experimental, boundary-pushing force.

Released by One Day Savior Recordings in 2000, the album found the four-piece dabbling with complex guitar arrangements, fluctuating meter, and unorthodox song structure. Break of Dawn’s members were as influenced by the lofty prog rock of King Crimson and the technical death metal of fellow Rochesterians, Lethargy, as they were the experimental hardcore that was cropping up in the late '90s. But really, at the center of their sound was a desire to be original and to push the limitations of their own skills.

Figure Studies In Arsenic and Tears never got its proper due, and though the band carried on for a few more years, burrowing even deeper into their experimental tendencies, the album faded into obscurity. Today, members can be found in the bands Locrian and No End, each of which hints at ideas they presented in Break of Dawn.

Nearly 25 years after its release, all four members of Break of Dawn that played on Figure Studies joined us for a conversation and reflection on the album—one that should be considered right alongside those released by bands like Botch, Coalesce and Converge.
 

PART I

There’s an evolution in the band’s sound between the early days on into the Stop. Start Over. 7-inch, and then eventually into Figure Studies. What are your memories of the trajectory from a more straight-ahead sound to the more technical style you guys shifted into?

Jeff Asbrand (drums): The elevator version of the history of the band is that Eric and I had this buddy, John Twentyfive, and we decided we were going to start a hardcore band together. He was a pretty forceful individual, and very determined about the sounds that we were going to have as a band. It was late 90s, but it was high water for Victory Records and things like that. I think that there was a lot of the typical old school hardcore elements to the early Break of Dawn stuff, especially the '98 demo. We were playing hardcore shows; John was getting us on a lot of shows. We'd play with bands that we liked at the time, but typically Syracuse and Buffalo bands. 

Eric LePore (guitar): We were playing all the old school shows with the block letter flyers—Earth Crisis and Snapcase and Buried Alive. We were able to get on those shows and they were well attended, and at the time we had a very old school hardcore appeal. Not to personify John Twentyfive as a forceful individual per say, but he was definitely determined in the vision of how the music was going to turn out. You mentioned you can notice a shift from one recording to the next, and when we got to Figure Studies, that was our biggest shift. When folks first heard that recording that were less familiar with us locally, it came as a surprise I think, for better or worse, especially for the folks at One Day Savior Recordings.

André Foisy (guitar): I was the new person in the band around 1999/2000, and I knew Break of Dawn since they started playing; I met Jeff and Eric because my band [Husk] in high school from the north country of New York State—from the Potsdam area—had played at some VFW hall in Rochester, and Eric's former band played, and I think I met Jeff there or soon afterwards. We just got to be fast friends, and then I had seen the first iteration of Break of Dawn, and I was the fill-in guitar player on one of their tours with the singer that was before Matt. 

Jeff: Yeah, we had a singer on the first '98 demo who, basically he left the band and so Matt, being our roommate at the time with John Twentyfive and I, jumped aboard. 

Matt Burns (vocals): I don't know how I ended up being in the band. We were all staying at the same house; Eric, Jeff and I were at RIT [Rochester Institute of Technology]. I got kicked out of RIT and I came back, and I needed a place to live and I got hooked up with these dudes. I had been in a band in Binghamton for a minute that was just doing like Despair and Sick of it All covers, basically, and so that organically came together. I didn't meet André until he was officially in the band. John had dipped after we started evolving toward more proggy, techy weirdoness.

Jeff: We sort of chased out Craig [guitar] and chased out John because of the evolution of our music. I think we all collectively agreed that hardcore in its very typical verse-chorus-breakdown-end formula was kind of passé and had its time and place and it was over. So we wanted to evolve, I think.

Matt: It just wasn't doing it for us. These dudes are miles beyond where I've ever been, just seeing what they can do and their ability. I had no training; I was just coming in like, "I just fucking love hardcore, dude." I knew the bands I liked and I knew what I wanted to sound like and I just tried to emulate that. I was just kind of along for the ride in the best way possible, because it was super fun. So Stop. Start Over., I always kind of thought that was the transition 7-inch, hence the name. It was Sean [vocals], and now we're switching stuff up and now we're moving to this new thing. It's a four-song 7-inch, I think two are Sean's songs and two are one that I did lyrics for, so it was that transition thing. I felt bad because I remember John chose to leave, it was going in a different direction, which I appreciate. I respect that. We were doing weird stuff.

Jeff: And it was much harder to play. It's not simply fun point-and-shout anymore. It was painstaking creating these songs and practicing them continuously until we could actually play them. I think for Eric and I, and I think we're getting into the hierarchy of the musicianship here, we were playing just above our level and always trying to make ground to be able to play and keep up with the kinds of ideas that were being shot around. I think André, with a lot of technical ability, lifted that boat for us in that sense.

Eric: I have to point out that we do have to do this rewind to answer the question in the present. There's some other components that I remember that were really important. The first time I heard Matt's vocals it was like, "Wow, these are very distinct in a really cool way. Some people are going to love this and some people are going to hate this, but I'm really digging it." And so when Matt first did vocals for us, it was like, this is going to be awesome. 

Another point is, at some point early on when I first met André, we were in Buffalo and I remember visiting him in his dorm room, and I remember it being kind of strange. There was a bed and half stack, and that was it. I knew he played bass in Husk and I was surprised to see a guitar and a half stack, and he had a 7-string Ibanez Universe, and I was like, "Whoa, hang on a second." I remember playing his guitar and he were super modest about it, and I was just not very far along in pursuing guitar skills, and then he started shredding these scales and doing A-major sweeps in front of my face. I just felt like an idiot, but at the same time I was really also impressed with his guitar skills, and him growing up in the North Country, explaining to me, "It's really cold up here and all we have time to do is play guitar." Meanwhile, I'm out skateboarding and trying to figure out Gorguts or Human Remains or Lethargy prog-metal type stuff.

I wasn't really influenced so much by old school hardcore, so I was a bit of fish out of water with the original lineup and how that came together. But when André came on board he introduced me to a lot of very progressive guitar skills. I was interested and wanted to move forward in that direction and really, André helped steer that, and Jeff was interested in playing more interesting polyrhythms and things like that. You're going to alienate your audience, too, which we did, and at some point in our songwriting we were purposely writing music to alienate a particular set of listeners that are looking for that prescribed songwriting equation that Jeff was explaining earlier. We just, as people—I'm hard-pressed to call myself a musician—were very bored with that rubric of songwriting, and I think we all were. I think our direction was, how can we make this different, and weirder and weirder, and interesting? For me playing guitar, it was challenging and I appreciated a challenge.

That's when we started writing the songs that ended up on Figure Studies, and we spent a lot of time on one song, going over things over and over, but at the same time, we had all types of ideas. We called it riffs in the bag. Like, "That's a cool riff, but I don't know if that's going to fit with what we're doing right now. Put that riff in the bag,” and we had a bag full of riffs that we were just constantly doing collage. It made things really interesting. It ended up being what you hear now, but the recording process was also pretty interesting too.

Jeff: It's worth noting that André lived in Buffalo. Eric mentioned visiting him in Buffalo. He diligently took a bus to Rochester at least once a week, probably multiple times per week for years to be able to practice these songs, because again, they're quite technical, pretty dense, kind of long. You couldn't just do that over Zoom back then; there was really effectively no remote anything. We all lived in Rochester going to RIT; he went to UB [University of Buffalo] and lived there. It's not a quick drive and he didn't have a car, yet we somehow managed to always be practicing and furthering our music during that particular part of time. We probably didn't pat him on the back about this much back then, but as I recall it now, that's pretty huge. That's a very big commitment and investment to do for something that we think of as a hobby nowadays. That was no small effort because it extended his practice by multiple hours every time.

Were you beginning to shift into playing with more like-minded bands during this period—bands that were actively pushing the boundaries during that time like Botch, Coalesce, Converge?

Eric: Yeah, we played with all of those bands you mentioned.

Matt: Yeah, I remember playing with Dillinger at Water Street; we played with Drowningman a bunch because of the Vermont/Plattsburgh connection.

Eric: We opened for Dillinger in Pittsburgh too, and Cave In during the Until Your Heart Stops era.

Jeff: There's definitely a lot of influence there. I loved all of that music, and I certainly was taking some inspiration from that. To Eric's point of purposely making things a little obtuse, it was nice to be able to see kids nodding their heads and then totally throw them, and they'd have to think about it, and they'd come back and nod their heads again. That was amusing, I guess. But at the same time, all those really technical metal-based riffs were the pinnacle of us playing heavy music together, in my mind.

Matt: I agree with that. That was the time, '97/'99, 2000/2001, people were like, "What is it, is it metalcore?" It was a newish kind of thing and you had these bands like Dillinger and Cave In, and when we would go on tour, Buried Inside was doing crazy stuff with time changes and these epic things. I remember playing with The End in Detroit. Pageninetynine. There was a whole scene within the scene doing these techy, metal influenced, but off-time kind of weirdo jazzy stuff, and it was like, "Yeah, let's do it." It did work against that traditional hardcore and I think we all kind of grew up in that. 

Jeff: I can't say that those bands necessarily had a scene supporting them. I'm guessing they did. Botch had other bands around, like maybe Harkonen, that were also doing that kind of music, and then they all had the fanbase and support of the locals that were doing that music. In Rochester we really didn't have that. Between Syracuse and Buffalo, that was always what squeezed Rochester's style, and I think people were still toting between Snapcase and Earth Crisis and all the bands that popped up there. That was still what was very much en vogue. You think of the New Years shows that happened throughout those years in Syracuse, and Hellfest and stuff like that, that was very much what is like New York hardcore. We didn't have that, so we were oddballs, basically on our own. We didn't have anyone to check us or encourage us that way. It is interesting to me that while those other bands were influential to us, they weren't necessarily on an island in the places they were playing. 

André: I remember being in Rochester and Botch played. I knew Botch because I had their 7-inch and they played to maybe 30 people in a basement the tour before they broke up, and now they're headlining these huge venues, which is great, but there wasn't really a scene for it. I think in Rochester there was the hardcore scene, which was constituted by many bands who might have been influenced by Shelter and Youth of Today, and then there was the metal scene. Eric introduced me to Lethargy.

Eric: One of my favorite bands. Erik Burke is amazing.

André: Total underrated shredder. Eric was like, "You gotta hear Lethargy. They play the riffs forward and they'll play the riffs backwards." I was into techy stuff like that, and that was a totally different kind of scene. It was a different scene than what Break of Dawn had started from when it was a more old school hardcore band. 

Jeff: At the time we had our last ever show, all of those guys were at that show, though. We had at least impressed the historic metal legends of Rochester by just doing our thing for long enough there. And of course, they all probably outlived our band too. Rochester has a rich metal past; we weren't really a part of it.

PART II

How were the songs being crafted?

Eric: We did a lot of collective songwriting. It wasn't like, "Hey everybody, I'm the guitar player and I wrote an entire song." A lot of bands write music like that. It was not like that for Break of Dawn at all. It was purely collective. Matt was there for every step of the way as well. As we were making decisions to make things a little more interesting, like, "Let's keep the guitar cyclical and simple in this progression but the drums will offset that by a factor of three, and then if you do some math, at the end we should all stop at the same time." These were the kinds of things that we were actually doing and interested in. There was a lot of time spent at practice.

Matt: I was coming in on the back end with the shitty boom box recording demo of the practice and I could figure out the time signature. 

Jeff: Those were like Easter eggs, though. We'd send you home with a middle of the room microphone recording of our new song and you'd come back with this incredible vocal. Matt's a writer and brought an entire depth to the lyrics themselves that Break of Dawn hadn't had since, and also that distinguished us from other bands. It would be pretty awesome, from my point of view, to suddenly go from an instrumental song that was really complex and pretty hard to play and was interesting on its own to having vocals on it, and it makes it better as opposed to a lot of dense technical music that you don't even want vocals to it. That's a bit of the magic that he had that he’s probably discounting, but it was definitely something that—and I've been in a lot bands—I hadn't experienced and haven't much either since.

Eric: Matt was always very distinct sonically, but also sitting down and reading what he had to say—at the time I wasn't into sitting down and reading books. As and engineering student I wasn't really interested in literary things like that, but I think Matt really sparked that for me because what he had to say and what was in the lyrics was really thought-provoking and interesting stuff. The meaning was left to the listener and I think that was really important to me.

Matt: I remember being on tour and we had cassettes on the van dashboard and it was like, "Let's listen to this random prog-rock" and then I'd be like, "Put this Smiths tape in." Or [Frank Zappa’s] "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow."

Jeff: For sure, Zappa, King Crimson, Yes. We were listening to a lot of that stuff, which is not hardcore and very much influenced all of this record, too.

André: A lot of the things on the album were things that we wrote early on when I was in the band. I joined right after three of the songs for the 7-inch were written, and at the time I think Eric was like, "Write some stuff." It almost seemed like Eric didn't want the pressure of writing all the music. I would just come up with some riffs during practice that would be off the top of my head in my own personal riff bag, and those are some of the things that turned into songs. After we did the 7-inch, Eric was like, "Write some techy shit."

At the time I don't think I could have written an old school hardcore song if I wanted to because it just wasn't in my nature. I grew up in the North Country near Potsdam, so it's got this rich arts community there on the one hand, and it's also this interesting place where if you leave the area as a kid, the places you could go see hardcore or punk rock are Montreal, Ottawa, Burlington, maybe Albany and Syracuse. So I was exposed to some bands from those different regions, I was into some of the more techy metal bands in that area. There was that influence, but I also had my brother who was at college and sending me prog rock tapes. I got really into King Crimson, the Discipline album, and Three of a Perfect Pair, which tend not to be people's favorite King Crimson era, but it's my favorite era and it's very techy guitar playing. It's very angular. It sounds like there's synthesizers on the album but there's not really any synthesizers. So I kind of brought that with me to band practice and I would just try out some riffs and I think these guys would be like, "Yeah, that's a good one," or, "Put that back in the bag."

Matt, were you being influenced by things you were reading at the time?

Matt: For sure Walt Whitman, but I think a lot of it was whatever I happened to be reading or whatever I happened to be listening to. My girlfriend at the time, my wife now had done a photo project about gun violence and had one photo that was the classic undergrad photo student kind of cliché shit, but you're eighteen and I was like, "That's a cool image." It wasn't like, "I want to sound like William S. Burroughs," or, "I want to channel Kerouac." These dudes are wizards on their medium and all I got is words, so let's try to do something interesting and weird.

I'm doing my weirdo English/Humanities/Poetry nerd shit and Eric's doing Engineering, and that's like a classic battle in academe. I think that's a big part of it; everybody brought their weirdness, or their uniqueness, or their interests. When I was trying to write stuff I was just writing random poems, essentially. I remember I was really into the band You And I, kind of emo/screamo type of stuff. It was cool you could scream stuff that is still heartfelt. I just did whatever came out. 

PART III

What was the recording process like for Figure Studies?

Eric: The guy that recorded that, his name was Stephen Ehrenwald and his nickname was Krusty because he looked like Krusty the Clown. The studio was in the basement of his parent’s house in Long Island. It was very interesting situation, but I remember as soon as he heard the clean tone on our amps, he was like, "We gotta clean this up." We were like, "No, this is why we play through 5150s." That's as clean as it gets and that's just the way we liked it, because it still has some distortion on the clean channel. If you hit the strings hard enough it's abrasive. It's an abrasive sound. It's clean channel, but your not being nice about it. I remember him trying to mix down the instrumental track, "Top of the World Meets The Bottom of the Barrel.” It's gritty, but I remember him as the sound engineer, he was really trying to clean it up. I think he did a good job. We let him do his thing, but he was definitely advocating for us to change the setting on our amps.

Jeff: I missed that entirely as I was cordoned into the laundry room. The drum isolation booth was literally the laundry room with washer and dryer and laundry on the floor. I couldn't see anyone, I could only hear them through my headphones.

Eric: Most drum rooms there's a window and we could see. In this case, we couldn't even see Jeff. That was a challenge

Jeff: Unbelievably hot and sweaty and uncomfortable. That's how it goes for a drummer for hours. Luckily it's usually over in the first quarter of the entire recording experience. But it was rough, I was very angry at them all for taking any modicum of glee at my discomfort, which I'm sure was super funny at the time, but I was taking it pretty seriously.

Matt: That whole recording experience was wild. Looking back it's hilarious, but I remember we were all so...

Jeff: We were kids and we had this idea of when you make a great record what it would be. We hadn't experienced it yet. André might have had a cool experience with Husk, but we hadn't. We'd only known Doug White and Watchmen [Studios]. We were like, "This is going to be like how Pantera records," and we were faced with that. It was hugely both disorienting and disappointing. The headphones he had were too big for my head so they duct taped them onto my head.

Eric: We were all trying to play beyond our abilities. That's where progression happens and we were definitely those type of people with our instruments. My aspirations were beyond what you actually hear sonically in the recording, but it's where I actually was at the time. I forgot what track it was, but the drums were really intense and he kept playing the scratch tracks back for Jeff and I think there was a metronome to click to, to get started, and it was a few takes and he was getting pretty frustrated. He couldn't see us, but he could hear us and we were laughing.

Jeff: It was like the first day. That's the first thing that happens. I had a bit of the frustys. It was all part of the process because by the time it was at the end and Matt was killing his voice, he only had so many takes and the window for being there was closing. That was at least as stressful as my experience, but I just got to sit on the couch and watch it happen. I think it all comes full circle.

Matt: Jeff's right. We had these visions because we had recorded a bit in Buffalo with Doug, so we had these tastes. We got into the basement down there and it was like, "All right, let's go."

Jeff: It was the label, too. There was an official label for the first time and it was being paid for, where we were just scraping our money together to get a couple songs on a demo prior. There was a bit of a salesmanship from Chris Tzompanakis, who was the guy that ran One Day Savior from Long Island—we're in Rochester; we communicated over e-mail a couple times. That was the extent of it. Then we arrive and we realize this is a real square peg, round hole situation. We're really weird and we're relentless in the pursuit of weird, and he really wanted a sort of buttoned up regular hardcore band, and I think that was known right away.

Eric: Our 7-inch matched his lineup pretty well and Figure Studies did not. I remember Chris stopping by to visit to check on how the recordings going and you could just see the color leave his face when he started hearing what we were recording [laughs]. It was not what he was expecting.

Jeff: That was never spoken, though. That was a feeling that we all obviously registered, but he kept it dignified. By the time we were done we were really happy with it, and I think he unfortunately was not. And I think that speaks to a lot of how it didn't get much further or didn't get a lot of distribution, or didn't follow the path that we kind of expected it too. But at the same time, we did this out of a labor of love, not to get rich and famous, so it was like, "Okay, cool, let's start writing some new music." That's what immediately happened and so this just became an artifact in the history of that band. I found a few people who really can appreciate it and it's like, "Oh, man, so it wasn't just us."

It's interesting that the studio was such a nightmare because the record does sound really good. 

Jeff: It was like baling wire and duct tape down there that we were met with, but clearly he got picked. This guy, Steve—Krusty—was picked by Chris because he had a reputation of being able to strangely produce a good recording. There was that and then I think some of it, also, which is still mystifying to me to this day, that mastering can take a mix that sounds meh and bring it into this really amazing place. I'm not an engineer, so I don't know, but I know we sent it to Alan Douches at Westside and it went from like a four to like a nine. That's part of it, too. 

How did you hook up with One Day Savior?

Jeff: That, I think, came initially through a connection where John had booked a band that he was in, Skycamefalling, up in Rochester. So that connection was made. Though John had since departed the band, I think there was actually a conversation that happened while he was in the band, and then we just went through with it from there. It was really our first label interest, and we were not being courted by others, so we were like, yeah.

Matt: Definitely props to John. He was a big scene guy, he was one of the main Rochester scene dudes, and he brought a lot of shit together. Not just putting on shows, but connections. This is pre-everything. We had an Angelfire page. So he was just working the phones making those connections. I did feel bad, John really worked to build a band and then was like, "Where'd it go?"

Eric: John was putting on a lot of shows in Rochester and surrounding areas. He was one of the hardcore hubs in Rochester, and he was also a graphic artist, so his attributed really catered to success in the hardcore scene.

André: Yeah. It was a really stressful record to produce because not only was Jeff in this tiny closet recording drums—and I really don't think his drums were set up the way he wanted them to be because it was so cramped in there, and that must have really difficult—but we recorded the drums to tape and it was before the prowess that modern ProTools and other digital recording formats would provide—we were using some kind of digital format for the guitars and vocals. It was hard to get the tape to sync up with the digital, and then the bass was added on last. I played bass in my high school band, and we had no bass player basically for the rest of Break of Dawn's existence after this record, but John had left the band prior to the recording of this album. I think it just wasn't what John was into because we started going into this less typical kind of approach.

Jeff: It was experimental for him.

André: I get that that wasn't his cup of tea. We kind of knew it. When we were recording the album, to me, it almost felt like we were alienating some of our Rochester home base people who wanted to hear the continuation of the band's original demo recording, but we were going in this more technical place where Eric and I wanted to do guitar harmonies and do nothing, really, in 4/4. And we didn't want to repeat things too many times because we had that influence from like Lethargy, for instance. So that was something that was a little more fun for us, and then when Chris came to see us in the studio, I think we all felt like Rochester isn't too interested in this new direction in the band, and it felt like Chris wasn't. Although he's reached out to me since then and he's told me this is one of his favorite records that he released. 

Jeff: It grew on him. That might be the thing about this record is that it's a grower, not a shower.

I actually mentioned this record to Chris when I interviewed him and he told me it's one of the ones that he goes back to and enjoys.

Jeff: No hard feelings, I think just at the time it was unexpected and it just kind of got dropped that way. He was juggling a lot of stuff. He's got a label and a ton of other bands, especially because in Long Island that's where generally all of that action was taking place. We were far removed from that.

André: At the same time, the dude was working his ass off. And we stayed at his apartment with his girlfriend, who I think didn't really love that we were just some dudes from out of town staying at their apartment for a week and a half. But Chris was working his butt off at a restaurant to pay the bills. He was really investing in the label, which was something I'm grateful for. He took a chance on us, and that was awesome of him.

How did the artwork come together?

Jeff: I did the artwork for it. I didn't do the illustrations; I pirated them. I took them from the archives—I worked at this educational technology center at RIT and we just had a vast library of slides and archival works. This was an early printing of Dante's Inferno and some of the illustrations that came from that. I also had no had graphic design ability, didn't really know how to use Illustrator and Photoshop very well. I'm a computer science major, so I knew how to use applications; I just had to teach myself how to do it. I spent months trying to get it together, and now I'm like, "Oh my god that's like a third grader did that." It was like canned fonts that came with the Mac that I was working on. All of these things, we just did it ourselves and we were always in the mode of doing it ourselves. It didn't really occur to us until later when we started seeing a really fancy hardcore or metal design and layout, they would make the album so attractive that you would want to listen. 

Matt: We did a 7-inch with Apathemy and I had badly thrown together a Photoshop thing. John did the Stop. Start Over. layout and that's slick as hell. But the Figure Studies stuff, even looking back, it still has that cult vibe to it now. It's like it might as well be a late-second-wave black metal album or something. There's a rawness to it. Does a Relapse record look fucking sick as hell? Yeah, Carcass with blood and sick logos. But we weren't thinking about that, we were like let's make some dope ass music and you can't have eggs without a carton, so let's put a carton on it.

André: I remember going to Rochester and Jeff had the layout and I was like, "Sweet." I knew he had worked on it for a long time, so I just appreciated that it was done, to be perfectly honest. Looking back on it, I recognize how challenging that must have been. Now you can make a cover easily on your phone, but at the time it wasn't quite like that.

Jeff: Yeah, you start in Photoshop, you push it into another Adobe program illustrator, and then you got whatever publishing stuff that was in a different lab. It really was the last lift. I think everybody signed off on it probably because it was like, "Well, I'm not going to change it, so let's just go with it." And I don't know Chris' take on that because it wasn't pretty and a lot of the stuff on his label was very pretty. Ours didn't fit that mold either. It was really raw and maybe darker and metaller than he had expected. 

Eric: When I first saw the graphics for the layout, it was like, "This is very raw and brutal, and it's very atypical." I appreciated the fact that it wasn't prototypical for what you would expect for an album layout at the time. I remember he was putting a lot of time into it and doing a lot of late nights. And he's right, no one else was really stepping up. When Twentyfive was in the band, that was really his department; that was all the things that he loved to do. But once Twentyfive left, it left us to figure this stuff out and Jeff really stepped up to the plate and made it happen.

PART IV

What happens to the band after this record?

Matt: I left of my own volition, but I was really focusing on my studies. I was really into school and I was figuring out what I wanted to do. I transferred to U of R [University of Rochester] and we were at different schools, and I was living with my girlfriend, so we just had this kind of distance that wasn't really conducive. We had been touring for a minute, doing these dope tours with Apathemy and Buried Inside, but I remember with me, at least, our last tour was weird. It was fun as hell. We played a weird show in West Virginia.

Jeff: Brandon Fest.

Matt: Yeah, we were down in North Carolina and the van broke down—real stressful stuff. We came back, and this has been covered in podcasts, but I was in a really over-aggressive I-hate-the-audience kind of mode. It was just an act, but it didn't come off as an act, so it turned into, "This band's good, but that guy is kind of a dick." In hindsight, absolutely. I was trying to channel that Simon [Brody] from Drowningman kind of thing, that antagonistic thing, really working to go against that mic-in-the-crowd singalong type of music. I didn't realize at the time, but of course now as an adult, I recognize that was cool for me, but it wasn't cool for these other dudes who are working really hard and had, if not a vision, at least a plan.

Jeff: We backed you one hundred percent. To this day I'm against needing to sing along to like a band. That was decision we could have collectively made. It didn't make us friends, though, and as a band we were still backing you. It was like, "Fine, have it your way and don't invite us."

Matt: I kind of took it too far, but I didn't know I took it too far. We had our inside jokes or whatever, but it was kind of alienating to a lot of listeners and to audiences. I got the mic, I can say whatever the fuck I want, and I'm saying some fucked up shit. Not racist or any fucked up shit like that, but just alienating, I think. That's not what you want. You want to be distinct and you want to be removed, but you don't want to make your audience hate you. Even GG Allin had a following—no comparison. I'm glad that it wasn't the end of it; it was the end of that phase.

Jeff: Eric and André and I just distilled even further when it was the three of us. It was great times still. André was still taking a bus, and we were practicing at this place I worked. We had this whole warehouse vibe and we could go and play whenever we wanted. We just kept writing music and we eventually found another singer, our other roommate, Brad [Dingman]. We had Rob Antonucci [Achilles, Dead To The World] on bass for a little bit. We had people fill in on bass, but it was always like, "Learn these parts and come on tour with us," not necessarily write the music with us. We eventually decided we didn't really need a bassist. 

Matt's accurate. He left because things were getting more intense for school. The constant touring, or attempting to play shows out of town, and having things breakdown and not work out just gets a little weary after a while and I think people were kind of tired. Matt was tired of it. Eventually I moved to New York, too.

Eric: We were all graduating at the same time, Jeff had gone to New York, André went to Chicago, I went to Arizona. That's just how it came out.

I remember that tour sucked and I remember all the worst. We got all these crazy horrible stories that we can laugh at now. Today's horror stories, tomorrow's humor. When we got back we were all kind of dismal and a little bit disenchanted with being on the road and how it all played out for us, especially with vehicular trouble, not having any money, not being paid well to play these shows. It was tough. I don't remember hearing anything from Matt for a while and we wanted to let that dust settle because it was a brutal coming home. I moved in with Jeff and Brad and we just started writing music again immediately upon return. We hadn't heard from Matt for some weeks and we just gravitated towards Brad's interest in filling that spot.

How do you feel about this record 25 years later?

Jeff: I had to listen to it again for this conversation, and something came up on YouTube that was like, "Here are these cult records you've never heard of," and it was one of them. It's one of those things where I don't spend a lot of time with it, but it's been so long now that I was able to go back and I was just thrilled to be remembering all of the things that made me happy. All of the negatives that I'm sure we filled your ears with don't really occur to me while listening to it. I remember months of laboring over the real intricate subtle parts of that record that make it different. I think the songwriting itself carries the record.

The most interesting part to me is how we did change time signatures and how we did marry different parts together without necessarily having them bolted together. There was improvised parts that came from the bass of just André’s playing it. We had never played with a bass in those songs and then suddenly there's this element there that lifted it. Even though we didn't really need it much later, I think that's something I hear in it now. I think little things like that, when I hear them make me proud of it. I think it stands up more than a lot of our other stuff that just came out on demos or mp3s eventually. This one is an artifact. It's something that you hold in your hand that has artwork that is a physical piece of art, and it's probably the apex of the art that we made as Break of Dawn. We did cool stuff later and we did stuff before, but I think this was the peak of it.

André: To me, this was a high-impact educational practice that wasn't part of our formal curriculum of college. We all were in college at the time, and then we did this album, which was so much project planning to get the thing made and to write the music. Then we had no idea how to market this thing, and we were also broke, and we were trying to figure out how to promote this record. We didn't have a lot of the capital that a lot of the other bands had that maybe never left their hometown. I wasn't in my hometown and neither was Matt or Jeff, so it was something where we were all working second or third jobs while doing this.

When I listen back to the record I'm really proud of it. I wonder what it would sound like if we had a chance to revisit those songs. I would probably make them even weirder. I think it was some really fun times writing music; it was an interesting time to make a record. We look at not only the music but also the aesthetic, all of that, as doing something different than what people were into. When you talk about the aesthetic of the record, the antithesis of what we were going for would be summed up in being the opposite of what would be on like a Bane record. That was popular at the time, and not that I hated that stuff, but we wanted to be separate from that, and I think that this record ended up being like that. I think Matt's vocals and his lyrics were really unique, and I think it was some of the coolest lyrics that I can remember at the time.

Matt: It's always kind of cringey to hear a younger you, and I look at my writing then and it's basically like one of my students now in a creative writing class. Of course, these guys play guitar, they're going to hear something that should have been different. There's some lyrics, but hindsight's 20/20. You hear it now and you look at what these guys are doing now, what Jeff and Eric are doing in No End, what André’s been doing for 20 years in Locrian, and of course, that's what they all sound like. It makes sense that 25 years ago it was sounding like this weird mysterious mix. Like André said, it would be something really related but different now, and I think that's really cool. I'm just so stoked that everybody stuck with some version of what they were doing then.

Eric: I'm very proud of that recording. It's very strange that it came out and people are recognizing it now. You're on the inside looking out and it's kind of hard to hold your own music with the regard that you would hold other people's music. I always listen to my own stuff more critically. This one, I get some frisson in some of the parts. "Love Letters," for example, we figured out how to do these atonal harmonies. It was a creative time for me, and one of the most adventurous times of my life. That recording process was freaking weird. We had a slow leak on our van tire and couldn't afford to fix it, and we were taking turns on a bicycle pump to pump it up every morning when we left Chris' apartment to go to Krusty's studio. Why the fuck would we do something like that? Well, it's because we were really in a creative process and that's what we loved the most. I think you can hear the most creative version of us coming together as a unit on that album. We could never reproduce those sounds.

Listen to more Break of Dawn here.