By Benjamin Joe

Alphahopper formed in 2014 in Buffalo and is composed of Doug Scheider on drums, Irene Rekhviashvill on vocals, John Toohill and Ryan McMullen on guitars and Sean Kader on bass. The band’s music  has been called “noise rock,” “hardcore” or some blend of “art-punk.”

According to their own bio, Alphahopper has released three LPs, including “Alpha Hex Index” in 2020, “Aloha Hopper” in 2019 and “Last Chance Power Drive” in 2016.

On March 21, their fourth LP “Let Heaven and Nature Sing II” will be released by Swimming Faith Records. An album release show is planned at Duende at Silo City with Del Paxton and Muddle at 7 p.m. on Saturday, March 29.

The band talked/answered questions via email as some members were out of the country or no longer living in Buffalo. The interview is below:

11/26/2022 show in Cleveland. Photo by Kevin McCann.

Q: It’s been five years since your last release and the new album is great! Can you tell me why you decided to get together and make it? How long did it take to conceive, collaborate and record?

Doug Scheider: Some of these songs had early iterations as far back as the pandemic. We were playing in headphones across John’s attic from one another, catching up, seeing what it felt like to play songs again after a long break. We’ve all been lifing pretty intensely since then, so this record was written a few songs at a time as we would book a show or discover that we all had time and energy during a lull in other activities. I think for that reason this record has more breadth than some of our previous material: it grew out of us at very different places with ourselves and our relationships.

Ryan McMullen: A while back, I made the decision to move away from Buffalo, which meant that the band would be in the same room together a whole lot less. So, at that point, we took all the new stuff we had written since we recorded Alpha Hex Index, realized we had a cohesive album’s worth of material in there, and started the long process of creating a record. Living in different cities made the work a little slower but we got there eventually and I think the end result is both a great testament to where we left off on our Buffalo chapter, and our best record yet.

Irene Rekhviashvili: I can’t believe it’s been five years. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. 

Q: Let Heaven and Nature Sing was your first album in 2014. Why revisit it?

Doug Scheider: It’s still singing!

Ryan McMullen: That tape from 2014 was essentially our demo—it was the first proper recording we ever cut (and it wasn’t even all that proper). The name of our first LP was “Last Chance….” which set a precedent of us choosing titles with some degree of temporal distortion. With my move and our 10 year anniversary as a band, it felt like an appropriate time to complete the circle and look back at where we came from.

John Toohill: Doug has been making the joke that we should name an album this since the demo. I’d like to think it was me who was the first to finally crack under the pressure of his (good) idea but I’m not sure. Either way, as soon as one of us faltered, there was no stopping it. He is very tall. I love the title but Ryan’s explanation sounds like we know what we’re doing (we often don’t) and I like that better.

Q. When it comes to the album, I’m loving it. I’m especially intrigued by AH01- AH03.  What is it about these three tracks that bind them together? (the three tracks are placed at the 4 ^th (AH01), 7^th (AH02) and 11^th (AH03: Voyager) spots on the album)

Doug Scheider: Those tracks are something like a core sample from a very old tree. They’re a snapshot of bigger moments, the lingering scars of history’s wildest storms. But they’re also not the tree. To where do its branches stretch? What color are its leaves?

Ryan McMullen: With 11 tracks of dense and calculated sonic overload, we wanted to create space for something more organic and free to blow through every once in a while.

John Toohill: Since the dawn of the band, almost all of our practices start with a sloppy screwball improv jam to warm up. I convinced them we should record a bunch of these jams during the tracking process and let me chop them up to be… something? We didn’t have a full plan yet. I asked Irene if she had any ideas for a spoken word poem or something that could be like the theme of the record and sent her the audio I had cooked up for AH03. She nailed it.

Q: Hey Sean! I think this is the first Alphahopper album with a bass. Can anybody tell me why the sudden inclusion?

Doug Scheider: Hi Sean! There’s been some bass backing on every recorded AH track so far, but we’ve always been really careful to keep it sonic and not artistic or expressive. We’d been messing around with a bassist to fill out the sound in live shows, and Sean impressed us by being all of our close friend for many years. Also Sean just kinda plays the right notes so those are the ones that ended up on the record.

Ryan McMullen: It’s true that we had secretly slipped in a bass track on all our previous records while somehow deluding ourselves into believing that we didn’t need a bass player. Sean has really proven to us how foolish we were because it’s so much better now.

Sean Kader: I’m just happy to be here! I honestly love everyone in this band, I’m glad they let me come on board.

Q: Hi Doug! You said of Alpha Hex Index that the album was the only thing your sci-fi band members and yourself hadn’t jettisoned. Is this album the same kind soul fuel that Hex was? Or is it something different? Anyone is welcome to chime in. (the full description can be found HERE!)

Doug Scheider: Hi! This absolutely does sound like the kind of crap I am prone to saying, but I have no idea what I might have meant by that. I do think that we were kind of at the height of something on Hexadecimal and that this record is something … different. This record is lying in the mud. This record is watching a challenging movie in a living room overflowing with construction supplies. This record is riding a bicycle downhill really fast on the first warm day of an overdue spring. This record is an infected wound.

Ryan McMullen: I had to do some Googling to find out where that quote came from and I think you were all the way up space-exploration-metaphor creek without a paddle back there … But these new metaphors do feel apt.

Q: Hi Irene! These lyrics are amazing. Where did you draw them from?  It’s good to hear your voice, how do you keep it in shape? Any other band member that has an insight is welcome to answer as well.

Doug Scheider: Hi Irene! I don’t know if this is relevant but I think Irene does “draw” in her lyrics notebook.

Irene Rekhviashvili: Hi Doug!! Anyway, a lot of the lyrics in this album come from ideas that I find alluring and romantic, ideas that give me strength and joy – rushing to your loved one on a stormy night, a woman completely powerful and completely herself, the peace of looking out at a garden you grew while it’s covered in inches of snow. Movies also give me a lot of inspiration – a handful of the songs I’ve written feel the same way I’ve felt while watching a particular scene of a movie. The album is also less science-fiction than usual, but that’s because I’ve been reading more fantasy (that’s a joke but also true).  As for keeping my voice in shape, just lots of practice in my car usually gets the job done, as my doggie doesn’t seem to appreciate the finer points of screaming to loud music at home.

Q: John and Ryan! Amazing guitars. How do you guys keep following one another and adding on riff after riff to create new music? Another thing other band members might have insight on.

Ryan McMullen: Thanks. For me, I think this kinda goes back to the previous topic of our historical lack of a bass player. When writing songs as a two-guitar / no-bass band, it’s always been important to us for the guitars to mesh together seamlessly so that we’re always filling out the sonic spectrum without the bottom dropping out. But with only two melodic instruments to work with, we also try to differentiate our parts as much as possible to keep things interesting and textural at the same time. Writing in that way has led us to this hyper-connected, two-headed beast guitar style where we’re playing off each other and doubling each other at once like pistons of an engine. Once we brought Sean into the mix, that precedent was already pretty established in terms of what our “sound” is, so we kept moving forward with this very intertwined guitar style and let him work the bass in as a reinforcing layer of glue to hold it all together.

John Toohill: Ryan nailed the deeper explanation but honestly I just usually play whatever ’til I see him start to get excited and throw weird noises back at me. It kinda flips back and forth that way between us. Then Doug plays some backwards-ass drum beat that makes the riffs feel completely different and I realize none of us think the same way at all. This band’s creative challenge (and prime enjoyment) is mostly trying to figure how to let everyone do whatever the hell they want (cuz they are gonna anyway) without it sounding like walking into a Guitar Center. Irene is actually the anchor most of the time because of how she punctuates it all. So how do we all keep following each other? I’m not sure we do!

Doug Scheider: Hello to John and Hello to Ryan! They are repeating the sounding joy.

Q: Again with the name. It makes me feel like “full circle” energy. Are there plans to go further with Alphahopper or is this a last hurrah?

Doug Scheider: Listen, you’re under-weighting the word “Let” in your reading of the album title. Both Heaven and Nature are a priori singing. You can Let Heaven and Nature sing to you if you are willing to hear them. You can open your mouth and open your heart and Heaven and Nature will be Singing through you for all to hear.  It’s like letting the Sun come up. It’s like letting a ball roll downhill. It is not permission in the sense of allowing but rather an Occuring; a melodic rupture that accepts into being the figures of the ideal and the unmitigated.

Ryan McMullen: It might be a full circle, but it’s not necessarily the end of the line. A circle has no end.

Benjamin Joe writes about music and the arts – particularly hardcore punk – for The Buffalo Hive.