Interview with Full of Hell and Eye Flys Guitarist Spencer Hazard: Stolen Gear And Walls of Noise
Benjamin H. Smith
Since forming in 2009, Full of Hell have been at the cutting edge nexus of noisy hardcore, noisy metal and just good old fashioned ear bleeding noise. By fearlessly pushing their music to new extremes they’ve built a devoted fan base on the back of heavy touring and steady releases. They signed with Relapse Records in 2018 and last year issued the full-length Weeping Choir, produced by Converge studio mastermind Kurt Ballou.
Unfortunately, all this forward momentum came to a crashing halt this past Thanksgiving when their van, including all their equipment and merch, was stolen from a hotel parking lot in Atlanta.
We spoke to guitarist Spencer Hazard about life, music and how they’re soldiering on despite this setback. Oh yeah, and we talked about a bunch of guitar nerd shit too.
Benjamin Smith: How did you get started playing guitar?
Spencer Hazard: I first got interested in guitar because my friend’s older brother had one. I would always go over to his house and we would mess around with it. I’m an only child so I didn’t have any older siblings to show me musical stuff. I discovered things through other people or record stores. My friend wanted to start a band so I asked for a guitar for Christmas when I was 12 or 13 and my parents bought me a shitty Harmony guitar that you could barely set up properly. I didn’t really take interest in it until high school, when I was 16 or 17.
BS: From there, how did you get into underground punk and metal?
SH: I feel like for my age demographic and peers, I got into punk just from discovering (Epitaph Records’) Punk-O-Rama compilation CDs. There were also a couple alternative music stores near me, which is surprising because I live in a really small town in Maryland. I would go there and be able to find Carcass CDs and Cattle Decapitation. But I also think for my age group, it was discovering stuff on Myspace. You could go on there and find any band, which was a new thing. And there would be Myspace groups completely dedicated to grindcore and powerviolence. That’s how I found out about a lot of it.
BS: Full of Hell have been together for 11 years. How have your influences as a band changed from when you started until now?
SH: I think us touring so much and playing festivals has had an influence because we’re playing with so many different types of bands, both new and old. When we started out it was more crust and hardcore oriented stuff. Deathwish Inc. was a very popular label then so we were into bands like Cursed and Trap Them but then we started getting more into straightforward powerviolence. Bands like Man Is The Bastard and Gasp, who not only were playing super heavy and fast but also adding avant garde and noise elements. From there we started discovering bands like Swans and Throbbing Gristle. Bands like that have been a staple influence on us besides adding more elements of death metal and stuff like that. We look at ourselves as a hardcore band but we try to take influences from every type of extreme music and combine it into something coherent that doesn’t feel forced.
BS: Walk us through what happened with your van getting stolen.
SH: We are a very cautious band. We always have someone sleeping in the van and we always have someone looking out. Even when we do stay at hotels, I’ll find a wall under a light and back up so even if you broke in, there’s no way you could get anything out. We’re not like the type of band that you hear about who are like, “We left the money in the van and someone broke in and stole all the money and laptops.”
We were on tour with Cattle Decapitation, Atheist and Author & Punisher. It was the night of Thanksgiving. We had a show in Florida the night before and we had a show on Black Friday in Atlanta so we drove there and stayed at a hotel near the airport and parked like we usually do. Hotels are usually safe so we seldom have someone sleep in the van at them. We were parked under a light, there were a ton of cars in the parking lot and we thought it was completely fine.
Our merch guy woke up early the next morning and wanted to get his headphones out of the van so we gave him the keys. He came back 20 minutes later and said, “The van’s gone.” We were like, “Are you serious?” We all ran outside. We called the towing company and they had no information. We called the police and they looked at the security camera and someone pulled up at like 3 a.m., jumped in the van, hotwired it and stole it within five minutes.
BS: Are there any leads? Has anything been recovered yet?
SH: No. We’ve tried to talk to the police multiple times and there’s no leads and no information, no help. They basically told us vans and trucks and SUVs are the most common vehicles to get stolen because they’re more likely to have something valuable in the chassis.
BS: This resulted in you cancelling the rest of your dates on the tour, correct?
SH: Yeah. I had extra guitars back at our practice space but there’s no way we would have been able to rent a van and not lose a ton of money because we didn’t even have any merch left. They stole all of our merch. Our bassist, Sam DiGristine, lost all of his gear. Our drummer, Dave Bland, lost every single piece of drum equipment he had including a ride cymbal that was gifted to him from Igor Cavalera (Sepultura, Cavalera Conspiracy). That was a very heavy blow for him. He was like, “I don’t care I lost my whole kit. I can’t believe that ride is gone.”
BS: Then someone set up a GoFundMe page for you, right?
SH: Yeah. We hate asking for any handouts or anything but it was at a point where it became a necessity to ask for money. We never expected it. We didn’t even make the GoFundMe page ourselves. Someone put it up for us and then we discovered it and posted about it on our Facebook page. It’s very overwhelming the amount of support we got. We feel very appreciative. It’s very humbling.
We made sure we were able to replace every bit of gear that we lost. Something people don’t realize is how all of the little shit you have on tour adds up. The amount of cables and patch cables and extra packs of strings ends up being hundreds and hundreds of dollars but you don’t take that into account until you’re replacing it all. We made sure we put money aside for a van once I figure out if or when I’m getting anything from insurance.
Right off the bat, we were like, if we get anything excess, we need to donate it to a charity. Once we figured out how much it would cost to replace all the gear and put a fund aside towards a new van, we had this extra money. We discussed what kind of a charity we wanted to donate to and we all agreed on one from Philadelphia called Rock to the Future. It’s a music charity for underprivileged kids to help them pay to go to music camps or buy gear for them to practice with. It helps kids get a music education since that doesn’t really seem like a thing in schools anymore.
BS: I want to ask about your guitar rig but I’m not even sure how to approach that question since so much has been stolen from you. What have you been able to replace?
SH: Luckily, with pedals and amps and stuff, I was able to get basically exact replicas of everything. And even with the guitars, we’ve worked with Fender for the past year, so, it sucks that we lost so many guitars but they’re replaceable because they’re still production models. I also lost a custom made aluminum guitar. Hopefully, because it's so distinct I’ll be able to track it down eventually but who knows.
BS: What is your basic live set up?
SH: We do two 4x12 Orange cabinets running in stereo. I don’t do stage right or stage left, it just depends on how big the venue is, so on the main side that I stand on I run an Orange TH100 and then on our bass player’s side I run a Rockerverb 100. Besides the aluminum guitar, for the longest time I’ve been playing either the new Player series Jazzmaster from Fender or their Powercaster but now I replaced it with a Player series Stratocaster.
BS: I know you use the EarthQuaker Devices Erupter. How do you balance different gain stages with your amp?
SH: I use drive pedals and fuzzes just to give me different tonal qualities. If I’m going to buy an amp, I want to make sure it has a good gain channel so I can drive it and the amp sounds good on its own. I run the amp very bass heavy and the gain at almost 9 or 10. I usually have the amps cranked. When I use dirt pedals like the Erupter, I have it so when I hit it on it’s like a blown out guitar sound. That way I can do some droney chords or I can make it sound like I’m playing a drop pedal or something, like I’ve tuned the guitar down almost.
BS: What other distortion or drive pedals are you using?
SH: Currently, we have a signature pedal, the Full of Hell Weeping Chaos, from Abominable Electronics. It’s an octave fuzz with a delay channel on it but it also has an instantaneous noise wall, so you can turn it on and do the heavy fuzz with a delay underneath it and then hit the noise wall and it instantly blows out the signal and completely destroys it and does a wall of harsh noise.
I’m also currently waiting for two discontinued EarthQuaker fuzzes which are in the mail at the moment; a Fuzz Master General and a Terminal fuzz.
BS: Between the amp and pedals, how do you manage unwanted noise?
SH: Because there’s so much gain, it’s usually going to hum, so I have an A/B switch with a ground lift that gets rid of the hum. If it’s still bad, I’ll us a noise suppressor in between songs but I never use one during songs.
BS: What other pedals are you using?
SH: For the past six months I’ve also been using a pedal from Death By Audio called Total Sonic Annihilation, which is a like a looper. You just loop all of your pedals through it and once you turn it on it completely changes the tonal quality of the noise that you’re getting from whatever other pedal you’re using. It gives you cool textural noises or just completely harsh searing feedback and sometimes it even sounds like it’s oscillating. I constantly have that on my pedal board.
Besides that, I think my main pedal is the EQD Dispatch Master. That’s the main pedal that I always have to have with me. It’s my favorite delay pedal I’ve ever played with. With some delays, no matter how you set it, it sounds kind of choppy, but the reverb underneath the delay on the Dispatch Master makes playing chords and stuff flow and sound a lot smoother.
BS: What’s next for you guys?
SH: We’re flying out to California in January and playing a couple of shows with Ceremony and then in February we’re opening up for Mr. Bungle in New York City. After that, we’re going to Russia for the first time and then doing a European tour. Full of Hell is headlining, Primitive Man is the direct support and then my other noise rock band Eye Flys is opening. Then we’re doing a residency at the Roadburn Festival. We’re playing every single day. We’re doing two album run-throughs, an improvised set with Lingua Ignota and then doing an old school set of songs off our first 7” and first LP.
DEVICES MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
Benjamin Howard Smith is a writer and musician from Queens, New York. He plays guitar and sings for The Brought Low, writes true crime stories and reviews music documentaries. He uses and endorses Barry’s Irish Breakfast Tea.
