Entresol

Coping Mechanisms

Exploring the music of trauma

We all have different coping mechanisms to get through trauma, large and small.

Eugene experimental noise artist and musician Joshua Isaac Finch, who performs as Entresol, copes with trauma by making music — music sometimes made by the sound of Finch screaming into an Altoids tin full of mints.

“With a contact mic in it,” Finch says, “run through distortion and a pitch shift, and also reverb.”

The product of this experiment found its way onto Entresol’s latest EP, the fantastically titled How Quickly We Normalize What Feels Like the End of the World. EP tracks like “Mortise & Tenon” are a little like a Tom Waits dub remix, blended with Nine Inch Nails and a weirdly deconstructed 12-bar blues song structure, frozen in liquid hydrogen and then shattered with a hammer.

It’s “intentionally weird,” Finch says, oversimplifying the work.

“This EP in particular is maybe the most minimalist,” Finch says. “It’s largely comprised of contact mics, distortion pedals, one severely outdated Boss drum machine and metal boxes.”

Nevertheless, on the new EP Finch tried to balance harshness and abrasiveness with hooks. “Something to bring people back,” he says.

“Each track on the album is about something fairly different. In each case, there’s an atrocity, a personal or large-scale trauma, that has been adjusted to,” Finch says.

This can be a necessary means of coping, but it can be problematic. “Remaining bothered, remaining upset, is a necessary part of moving forward,” Finch says.

Entresol with Eugene’s Synaptic and XrayVsns

Friday, March 8 • 9:30 pm 

Sam Bond’s

$5 • 21-plus.