[Cover photo credit to MJ Wojewodzki (2023)]
Baltimore-based multi-genre songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Shel Plock launched a new project in late summer based around its own story and sound world: Grave Domain. The world, project, and album, as well as title track, bear the same name, which gives you a pretty solid suggestion of what the project might be about. The album art, logo, and website add to the dark fantasy feeling of the name with an extra lo-fi edge that makes the whole project feel more hand-crafted and therefore more intriguing.
Leaning into classic Metal traditions, Shel Plock sets up a journey into horror elements, particularly those inspired by the films of the late 70s and early 80s, and the film comparison doesn’t stop there. The album Grave Domain has a specific narrative, a conceptual journey replete with different character voices and way-stations while setting course into the Underworld of so many mythologies. But what’s particularly interesting about this filmic sound journey is that the vibe or tone of the experience is so carefully constructed through Shel Plock’s exploration of techniques blending acoustic and electric elements.
I spoke with Shel Plock about his own discoveries in combining story and sound that led to the world of Grave Domain and we took a diversion into discussing of genres on the way there.
Hannah Means-Shannon: The way that the Grave Domain album is set up, building up a kind of narrative, makes me think of theatrical productions or a film. Is that crazy?
Shel Plock: I would love to work with a director and actors in a musical theater sort of setting. That really appeals to me.
HMS: Can you imagine this as a heavy metal musical? That would be so much fun.
Shel: I’d love it. Yes.
HMS: I see that you have worked in a lot of different genres, and still do, ranging from Americana, to Jazz, to this heavier music. Does that mean, as a listener, you didn’t limit yourself as a young person, and even now?
Shel: I think that’s true. I think part of it is that I came of age in the late 80s and early 90s and so one of the things that happened there is you often ended up listening to music that was around you rather than music that you could dial up in an instant.
There was a guy up the street whose father played Bluegrass, so I heard a lot of Bluegrass music. The kids in the neighborhood listened to Hip-Hop, so I listened to a lot of late 80s Rap music. In school, I hung out with a lot of the Heavy Metal kids. I played in a Jazz band because it was an opportunity to play music. I don’t know what it’s like right now to play for kids, but that experience of engaging with what was around me was a big part of my musical upbringing.
HMS: I can relate to that. I think I was in my 20s before I bought a CD with my own money. I was an opportunist and borrowed and copied other peoples’ music. Older musicians than us listened to the Top 40 on the radio and they blame that for their multi-genre abilities. What do you think caused these deep genre specializations?
Shel: I’ve thought about it a lot and I think back to the days of MTV in the late 80s. Evenings on MTV, every hour you were introduced to and submerged into a new genre. Every hour it changed. If you sat there and listened, you actually got a really broad experience of the music. Sometime in the 90s or aughts, rather than having one channel that would have multiple genres, instead of having one channel, you had genre-specific channels.
That broke things up. If you wanted to listen to Country music, you would only watch Country Music Television. I think it had a big effect on cutting up the music market. Then, with streaming coming along, it forces you into hyper-genre categorization as a function of putting music out there.
HMS: The biggest distinction that I saw happen, which you hit on right there, is that anything connected with Roots music became hyper-differentiated from anything with electric guitars. I was interested in the Grave Domain project anyway, but I was really surprised when I looked at your bio and saw that alongside this heavy music, you have also worked in Roots music mainly because it’s something I’ve had to defend and explain for a number of years now. I’m often put on the spot about it for working in both fields.
Shel: Understood. These days, I’ve got studio and I work on my projects. I’ve got a regular Bluegrass jam that I play in to keep my chops up. I’ve got a regular Jazz thing. There, I really like listening to other people, including new kids coming up to see what’s going on there. I just try, consciously, to keep myself in a position where I’m open to different musicians and keep myself open to different audiences, but also, not apologizing for it at all.
HMS: As someone who records and releases music, I’m sure that it puts some strain on you to decide what categories to use for your work, because these genres are clearly falling together now and yet there’s a counter-movement to hold to these categories for distribution.
Shel: Yes, because now, so much of discovery is driven by the under-lying data. If you go on Bandcamp and start a new project, you have to pick a broad-level category like “Metal” or “Country”. What happens is that even artists who are working even within a genre could experiment with a wide variety of approaches. You’ll see an artist who is categorized and put up in the streaming charts as “Metal” and that they’ve put out an album that is only tangentially related. How do you allow artists to change as they experiment when you force them to categorize just to play the game?
HMS: I don’t want to be all doom and gloom about it. It does also push artists and writers to be more inventive with the language that they use to describe music.
Shel: Absolutely. For me, when talking with other artists, using the language of music and film projects really works well. Then, you can say, “On this record, we’re telling this horror story and it’s going to have this kind of flavor. We’re going to build around that.” And you can say that as opposed to saying, “Here are eight Judas Priest songs.” [Laughs] It’s just a different thing.
HMS: That actually suggests the breadth of the ability of the people concerned when you do that, because you’re acknowledging that the people involved have a wide-ranging tool box and can play in a number of styles, but they are picking one for a project.
Shel: Yes. And among the musicians who I work with, it’s rare that I find one who isn’t interested in exploring things in this way.
HMS: When did you start entering this headspace for Grave Domain? I saw that during the pandemic, you started working on some Metal. Was that a forerunner?
Shel: I think during the pandemic, for one reason or another, I set up a new studio situation at home and I just started writing and recording heavy music, to differing results. Before I knew it, 2020 turned into the middle of 2022 and I realized I’d developed a whole catalog of songs, but just as importantly, I had worked out a whole workflow as a Producer to put out music like this. Then I thought about focusing on a new project, and when I start a new project, I always start with the story, concept, or world I want to create. I started sketching out this idea of working in the realm of heavy music, but thinking in the realm of 70s and 80s horror movies and splatter movie sountdracks. John Carpenter synth scores, for instance, and things like that.
What happens when we start thinking about heavy music in that way? That obviously pulls in Goth and Death Rock influences. Before long, I felt like I had all the parts to make this cohesive world. That’s what I really wanted to come out of this first album. It was like a statement of intent: The band’s named Grave Domain, the album’s name is Grave Domain, and the song “Grave Domain”, introducing the kinds of subjects and the world that would be explored with this music. As it goes on, I think and approach and the genres of music that are explored within those themes may change over time. But what I really latched onto was the creation of this world. I felt like I could see it, like characters in a book. That’s really wanted to go for.
HMS: Did having that kind of structure help you move towards a goal of completion and release of material?
Shel: I think a big part of it was the relative lack of distraction. I purposefully created playlists to listen to while I was working, but otherwise I tried to decompress away from being online and watch some movies and think about things. I approached it that way. The lack of distractions gave me the opportunity to flesh it all out and get it Produced. Now that it’s Produced, I have a baseline for understanding what the world of Grave Domain is. It’s like world-creating now that I have this baseline. Now what I intend to do is put out a few albums and go out on a tour to explore that world. Wherever that takes me musically, I intend to keep exploring that world within those themes.
HMS: Obviously, the arc of this album has to do with the Underworld. I think the relationship between the everyday world and the Underworld is part of it, too. What can you tell me about the world of the album?
Shel: The first song on the album is called “Estes Method.” I think the lyrics to that song might have been the second song that I worked on for the album. My wife texted and me said that there was a ghost-hunting tour a couple towns away at a local theater that is allegedly haunted. They wanted us to show up at midnight and hang out in the theater until four in the morning, and they were going to give us all this gear, and we were going to look for ghosts.
I thought, “This is fantastic.” So we did this. We had all these buzzers and machines for ghosts to talk through. Sometime during that experience, the one thing that went through my mind was, “Man, this type of thing must really piss off ghosts!” I got this idea about some ghosts who take umbrage that you are coming into their space and hunting them.
I got home and made the first sketch of the lyrics, about ghosts who were not afraid to hunt the ghost-hunters, from the point of view of the ghosts. That then drove the way that I approached the lyrics for the rest of the album. I really liked the idea of taking the point of view of these characters, whether they were ghosts, or whether they were psychopomps leading you to the world of the dead. I took the approach of singing from that point of view. We mentioned musical theater earlier, and as a singer, I’ve always felt much more comfortable when I’m able to sing from the perspectives of characters rather than in the first person. That’s always freed me up so that’s exactly what I decided to do. Everything was from a different point of view, with characters for each song, and it all started from that trip to the haunted theater.
HMS: That is quite a foundation story. I love it. It seems like you came up with a new vocal style for yourself just for this album. Is that true? It needed a very specific sound and approach. It’s a great combination of melodic vocals and screaming vocals, which are often the two main approaches in Metal.
Shel: There are two things that contributed to the vocals coming out the way they did. One was that before recording, I set up a condenser mic right on me, that I was singing into. Then I had a dynamic mic, right next to the condenser, which was actually feeding into a small amplifier. Then the amplifier was going over to the computer. The result was the blending of two sounds. There’s some edge there. When you have on headphones, but are working against a microphone, there are some techniques you can use to give it an edge without actually screaming your head off.
Working in that balance between the clean vocal and the slightly edgy, dirty vocal going through the small amp resulted in that sound. My voice, naturally, is in that in between high baritone and low tenor. On this, I forced my voice down a little, but it doesn’t go that low. I feel like I was singing from the bottom part of my mouth and out of my chest as opposed to Country or Bluegrass music where I might use a more nasal voice.
HMS: Refining that sound must have been the process of hitting on something that had the right atmosphere, and the outcome definitely does.
Shel: It goes back to that idea of creating characters and being like a film director. I treat my own voice with the plasticity that I would any other instrument in a production. It’s not some confessional thing, but it’s playing a character to get the story across.
HMS: That really unifies the album, too, that sound and atmosphere. For the “Estes Method” song, and also with others, the beat is so important and changes dramatically. Even some percussion elements that I wouldn’t expect come in, possibly from other traditions. Were you aware of that being important to the mood as well?
Shel: What I actually do with percussion is that I’m working and blending both electronic and acoustic percussion throughout the entire album. I want it to have a kind of feel. One of the things that inspired me while I was working on the Production is that sometimes you’ll notice on the toms, there’s a fill, and there’ll be a lot of hum.
I really worked to add some gain in the Production and sort of tweak that so that the overpowering aspect came through. Not as much as in the days of recording in a portable studio, but I wanted to suggest the hum and the reverberation getting a little out of control. I really, really like that and it creates this organic feel. Because I’m working with both drum machine and acoustic drums, I really like the idea that from a listener’s point of view, it all flows together and is just one sound. That’s a big part of things.
There’s a similar approach for a lot of the guitar work, where there are layers of guitar, but I did not want to create something that had a big, rich sound. I wanted something that was more sinewy, more 70s. There’s a doubling of clean guitars and acoustic parts in there. On my 20th listen, I probably don’t disambiguate the different guitars that are in there. It just becomes “the sound” of the record. And, again, that serves to tell the story.
