Black Dirt Blowout

The Casket Architects

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, April 30, 2007

Orange County is one of New York’s most beautiful areas, home to lush Harriman Park, Sterling Forest, and the southern end of the Shawangunk Ridge. But under an ash-gray April sky, parts of the region can take on a sinister, otherworldly hue. Wend your way up through the mountains on Route 17A and you pass one creepy, craggy rock formation after another. The twisted trunks of still-leafless trees crouch above the roadway, their gnarled, spindly branches edging toward your windows as you descend into the village of Warwick. And just beyond the far edge of town is the hamlet of Pine Island, once called “the drowned lands” and home to the famously surreal black dirt tilled by the immigrant Polish onion farmers who settled here.
“Yeah, the black dirt,” groans Evan Schlomann, the shaggy-haired, 26-year-old bassist of Warwick’s explosive punk quartet, the Casket Architects. “In the summer, if it’s windy out, everyone has to keep their windows shut because it blows right in. Right through the screens.”
In performance, Schlomann is an angst-seething dynamo, pounding the strings of his instrument and occasionally bellowing into the microphone. Off stage, however, his personality is largely that of a silent observer, a man of few words—and dry, sarcastic words, at that. But the story of the black dirt is clearly one that interests him. “There was a lake here, formed by glaciers that melted [12,000 years ago]. That hill with the pine trees over there actually was an island. The farmers drained the lake to make the fields but they kept the name Pine Island. It’s a weird place.” He’s right: The blackened soil makes the valley look like an alien landscape.
Perfect, then, that the locale should also be the breeding ground of a band whose music its members describe as “sci-fi death rock.” It’s a term that fits well. The Casket Architects—Schlomann, singer-guitarist Mike Shaw, drummer Annie Terror, and keyboardist Jon Duelks—play a futuristic, wildly abrasive brand of post-hardcore that takes the basic punk platform and bolts on elements ranging from thrash metal to art rock to industrial electronica. The final product is much akin to cramming Slayer, Frank Zappa, Devo, Black Flag, and Stockhausen into a trash compactor—with the controls cranked to loudly grind everything to a fine powder. The group’s lyrics, written mostly by Shaw and delivered in his corrosive, gravel-gargling shriek, are screen grabs of a bleak, postapocalyptic world, a realm in which half-homo sapiens/half-machine cyborgs lock horns in a battle for whatever’s left of humanity; think Mad Max versus the Terminator in a fatality-strewn demolition derby. Welcome to the future. It’s hell.