For musician Tristan Welch, Sutras is a project he's been determined to launch, despite some false starts. "Over the years, I had been doing music in the ambient/drone realm of things and truthfully never felt very 'home' there. So I started demoing some more punk-styled songs, and after battling demons and exploring lots of spiritual ideas, I jokingly called what I was demoing 'Dharma Punk," says Welch.
After searching for a partner to expand Sutras from a solo endeavor into a functioning band, he linked up with Frederick Ashworth. "We're both from the same punk scene, played in other similar bands, but just hadn't connected in over 20 years or whatever. After talking to Frederick about music and exploring spirituality, he asked to hear the demos and before I knew it we had booked studio time and we were going for it.
As Welch and Ashworth work towards finding a full lineup of musicians to bring Sutras to the live arena, they've released a 2-song collection called Awakening of the Spirit:
No Echo asks Welch how he would describe Sutras from a musical standpoint. "I definitely just like to keep it simple and call ourselves post-hardcore. While I'm not sure these influences are all heard I know they are there, we have a love for the neo crust movement of bands like Tragedy and From Ashes Rise along with the newer bands that blend some screamo in there too like Lagrimas or Habak.
"In our area outside of Washington, DC, we grew to love bands like Majority Rule, Pg.99, and City of Caterpillar. We love the big and beautiful sounds that bands like Jesu, Hum, and Quicksand pull off, and we have a strong love for shoegaze and post rock."
Recorded at Developing Nations in Baltimore with with Kevin Bernsten (Full of Hell, Pianos Become the Teeth), Awakening of the Spirit is the first chapter for Sutras which Welch explains serves a bigger purpose for him. "I had gone through a lot of shit over the years—being addicted to drugs, ruining my entire life, picking up the pieces, becoming straight edge by default, trying to learn who I was, being wrong about that, getting married and divorced, financial struggle and just shit.
"In my journey of recovery and life I got into lots of various things one of them being martial arts which lead me to buddhist philosophy. That was finally when a lot of things started making some sense to me, all this struggle and attachment. So lyrically and generally, as a project, that's what I'm trying to explore. How to just let go of all this shit that ruins fucking everything but for some reason I just can't fucking stop."
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Sutras on social media: Instagram
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