As the leader of an instrumental rock band, Weasel Walter (pictured above) says things like, “We can go up against any fucking band, man, and blow ‘em off the stage, because we’re into that.” Weasel Walter is also a composer, which leads him to statements such as, “If we’re gonna get really didactic, I would consider myself in the grand tradition of free chromaticists.” The fact that Walter can back up both of these statements with the same group is just one element that puts him, and the Flying Luttenbachers, among the most intriguing forces in modern music.

The Flying Luttenbachers have not always been a rock band. In fact, the only constant has been Weasel Walter since the inception of the moniker in 1991, when he was attending college in Chicago. “What I really do,” says Walter with a laugh, “is I hit these walls, and then I try to figure out what the next place to go is.” Among the walls struck by Walter and his rotating lineup have been no-wave compositions for jazz-rock ensembles, electric power trios, forays into raw acoustic free jazz, and even some uncategorizable recordings meticulously performed and arranged by Walter himself.

For the last five years — neatly coinciding with Walter’s relocation from Chicago to Oakland — the band’s style has been characterized by Walter as “brutal prog.” Their new record, Cataclysm, out on Walter’s own ugEXPLODE Records, features the virtuosic playing of Ed Rodriguez (of Gorge Trio) and Mick Barr (of Orthrelm and Octis) on guitars and Mike Green (of Burmese) on bass. Walter mans the drum chair, as he has done in every version of the group, though he also plays all the instruments on the epic track “Regime pt. 1.” Yet even the Luttenbachers’ current line-up can barely be stabilized. Green and Barr, for various reasons, did not play on the band’s August tour, and were respectively replaced by Tony Dryer, who has a grindcore and free jazz background, and Rob Pumpelly, who Walter claims a lot of people confuse with Barr because of their similar “Ted Nugent kind of vibe.” But Walter insists, “Everybody’s still in the band. We’re gonna do a record, probably later this year, with all six guys.”

However transient the group’s identity has been, Walter’s modus operandi has been clearly evident throughout. Two words he often uses are “dissonance” and “violence”; after even a cursory listen to the Luttenbachers’ output, there should be no surprise about that. “We’re into power, you know?” Walter asks rhetorically. “But we’re also into an intelligent deployment of this power. My approach to dissonance is very instinctual and I’ve developed my own systems for it. I’m also a romantic. I’m interested in epic thrust. I’m interested in drama and I’m interested in power. I don’t know if it’s so fashionable to be this kind of person, but I do it. If I could sum up what I do, I’m a free chromaticist and a romantic just tryin’ to make some groovy rock music.”

Cataclysm makes this mission particularly clear, being as it is one of the most focused and engaging releases under the Luttenbachers brand. It also brings to the fore another element that has brought some consistency to the group’s existence: the continuation of an epic and apocalyptic tale, begun in 1995 with Revenge of the Flying Luttenbachers (part of the “Satanic power trio era”). The story’s main characters are a robot named the Flying Luttenbacher, the image of whom graces the cover of Revenge, and two battling entities called the Void and the Iridescent Behemoth. In the liner notes of Cataclysm, which merely enhance the coherence of the record’s already-apparent narrative thrust, the Void and the Iridescent Behemoth eventually destroy each other. When prompted, Walter happily reveals the continuation of the story. “We’re left with cosmic nothingness, which is a recurring term of mine. But something always seems to regenerate out of this nothingness, right? I mean, that kind of apocalypse shit is tired. That’s been done a million times. What’s gonna happen on the next record is the robot, the Flying Luttenbacher, is going to reconstruct itself from these ashes with elements of both the Behemoth and the Void ... but it’s going to go insane. So I think it’s something about the delusions of this robot coming back up. And I think that’s going to be reflected in the ridiculous complexity of the music.”

Yes, Cataclysm may sound complicated and difficult to play, but Walter claims to have bigger and better in store. “There’s definitely an album coming out that’s going to make Cataclysm just look like ‘Louie, Louie.’ I see this [‘brutal prog’] going pretty far because, as time has gone on, I’ve found better musicians who can deal with these concepts. I don’t want to make it sound like I’ve had bad musicians, but I feel like as far as me writing something, handing it over and getting back what I meant, I have access to better musicians now. So I’m like, ‘Man, I could write fuckin’ anything and these guys will play it.’ And then it’s always like, ‘Well, what can I get away with? What can I write that we can play that’s just gonna make people go, ‘What the fuck?’”

The current process for the execution of Walter’s vision through the Flying Luttenbachers is a written score, with parts that he copies for each player, along with demo recordings to make the compositions more palpable for the ensemble. Walter emphasizes the importance of the demos. “I almost feel like it’s my job to convince people that it’s worth it, as long as it takes us to work on these compositions, so I have to hand them some kind of realization so they can go, ‘Oh, this isn’t blathering bullshit. This is worth learning.’” Then, once everyone has their parts down, the band records, and like a flash flood, they do the damage in no time. “We believe in rehearsing,” Walter says. “I think there’s an ethos in the band that is unspoken where everyone in the band really wants to fucking do this, and they want to do it well, and they don’t wanna fuck around. We did Cataclysm in one afternoon, [almost] all live. That’s how we do almost all of our records.”
Such a serious music ethos is rarely found in the rock world — yet another character trait setting the Luttenbachers apart from their peers. Concurrently, though his arrangements over the years have recalled James Chance, Albert Ayler or death metal, Walter’s compositional style is prominently informed by 20th century classical music. “I’m trying to take what I know and make it coherent, and I think that’s what a lot of so-called classical composers are trying to do. [In rock music] there’s so much incoherence, and that’s why you have so much apathy and garbage and saturation, because it’s so easy to just do rock and have it mean nothing. It’s just shit. Plug in a guitar and do it. Rock music can be better than that without being intellectual twaddle.”

On Cataclysm, the Luttenbachers deliver on the promise to make the cerebral visceral. In a particularly confident display, they make an explicit nod to the new masters by including a near-totally faithful arrangement of the fourth movement of Olivier Messiaen’s L’Ascension. It is as relatively beautiful and serene as it is unsettling. According to the liner notes, the role of the piece on the record is “as a macabre eulogy for the resulting vortex” of the final battle, but Walter provides an ulterior motive. “Most of the Luttenbachers’ stuff is obsessed with dissonance, but I also feel like there’s a certain emotional aspect that I’ve been suppressing. My joke [about L’Ascension] is that it’s Jesus’s doom metal. It’s a very crushing, perverse piece of music. It’s instilled with such terror. I need to start putting that terror in my music, regardless of the distortion and the energy and the frenzy. I need to find what the core of that is. I need to investigate pushing things further. There are other ways of pushing things.”

It is mainly this drive to grow, even after 15 years of maturation, that keeps the Flying Luttenbachers vital. Weasel Walter remains fiercely independent both aesthetically and operationally, and it is a testament to his work’s vitality that he gets all the backing he needs to make the project worthwhile. “I have help and support from a lot of people all over the world. [Plus] people who actually bother to pay for my CD help keep the band going because it makes us feel like we’re not just pissing in the wind and drenching oursleves in this urine. Without people saying, ‘Yeah, man, I’ll pay you thirteen bucks for this,’ we would be done. With the amount of work that it takes, some of it has to come back. [But] I really feel like I have to do this to want to be alive, to feel like I’m doing something constructive with my life. And that’s why I do it, and that’s why, ultimately, nobody can fucking stop me.”

www.nowave.pair.com/luttenbachers