Mouth of the architect.

OHIO'S OWN Mouth of the Architect seamlessly blends post-rock, metal, and well crafted songwriting into a sound that is both immediately crushing and pleasing. The line up is: Jason Watkins, vocals, keys, and samples; Dave Mann, drums; Gregory Lahm and Alex Vernon, guitar and vocals; and Derek Sommer, bass. They make intelligent, thought provoking music that will tear your face off like a highly-paid plastic surgeon.

The name Mouth of the Architect brings up a lot of imagery. What does it mean?

It more or less refers to someone being able to create something, or to shape their own reality or surroundings.

Let's hear a bit about Mouth of the Architect's history.

About three months after settling on a solid lineup, we went to Nashville to record a demo with our good friend Chris Common. After sending it to some labels, we got an immediate response from Drew at Translation Loss. He offered to put it out as is, and we titled it Time and Withering. We did a short tour, continued writing material, and then some internal issues left us on hold for awhile. We recorded our split with Kenoma in our house, while Chris was moving his studio from Nashville to Seattle. Eventually said issues left us without a bassist and a guitarist, and we immediately booked studio time with Chris in Seattle to record the record we'd been sitting on for over a year. That record was The Ties That Blind.

How have the lineup changes affected your sound?

The current lineup is pretty recent so we haven't written anything with them yet, but our live sound is every bit as good as it always was. We've always felt that we're more of a live band, beeause that's really what we enjoy doing.

Your music is very complex. There are huge build-ups with amazing introspective moments in between. Is it difficult to re-create live?

We make it a point never to record anything that we couldn't do live. What's on our records is pretty much what we hacked away at in our basement. In that respect, our recordings are a re-creation of what we do live.

What bands were you listening to during the writing process?

We all have such broad tastes in music that I couldn't even narrow it down to a long list, but while we were writing the record, mostly stuff like Tom Waits, Chet Baker, Harry Belafonte, Angels of Light, movie soundtracks, lots of calypso, rock, and doom.

Each piece seems to be so well thought out. What's the creation process?

A lot of it starts out with improv; someone will have an idea, and we run with it. When we're writing, we record most of our practices so we can pick out what was good about certain jam sessions. After we develop a skeleton of a song, we sort of hash out what we want to do with it, then play around with it until we're happy. Then again, sometimes a song will come out in one practice and we're done with it. We have no formula; we just want to play music that we'd like to hear.