When you gaze into the void, sometimes the void gazes back in the form of a Brooklyn experimental black metal band. Scarcity—featuring multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-Myers and Pyrrhon vocalist Doug Moore—finished their debut album, Aveilut, in the height of the pandemic in 2020.
Surrounded by death, the two crafted an album that reflects those feelings.
“When I was writing this music, I was experiencing a void — the absence of formerly-present human activity — at both personal and city-wide scales,” Randall-Myers, who experienced early stages of the pandemic in both Beijing and New York City, says. “I tried to reflect the scope and incomprehensibility of that void by working with a tension between musical activity and stasis, between repetition and unpredictability. I wanted to push the music I was writing to a point where the materials sort of collapsed in on themselves and became something else. I wanted to find a place where harmony, melody, and rhythm dissolved into noise and drone; where exhaustion could become endurance and where rage and grief could become a meditation.”
Moore, who lives in New York City, echoes that sentiment.
