Secret Chiefs 3 proves it. If you haven't been paying attention now is time to do so. The artwork to the albums is one big brilliant cryptic code for John Nash meets The Golden Dawn meets the Insane Asylum. And if you think you can crack it by yourself,you can't. He devised something "magickal" to make you scream in madness from not being able to figure it out. And every detail to his projects shows a brilliant madman who rebels at conventions at the flick of a Microtone.

Did you know he did Mr Bungle's "California" without edits?
using 3 24 track analog desks? You better applaud,mofos

And now here's Trey. Clearly one of the most underrated musicians/composers/arrangers/producers on the planet.







from vancouver newspaper "straight"

Freeform mayhem

By alexander varty

Publish Date: 5-Jan-2006
When he’s not playing with Secret Chiefs 3, Trey Spruance is in training to become an NFL linesman. His “touchdown” needs serious work, but you should see his “roughing the kicker”.

When he’s not playing with Secret Chiefs 3, Trey Spruance is in training to become an NFL linesman. His “touchdown” needs serious work, but you should see his “roughing the kicker”.

Book of Horizons, the fifth CD from California’s Secret Chiefs 3, is an enigmatic, shape-shifting survey of contemporary musical styles. Thrilling, visceral, and impossible to grasp in a single sitting, it encompasses Middle Eastern folk melodies, free improvisation, contemporary classical music, spaghetti-western soundtrack music, and the heaviest of heavy metal.

It’s hard to imagine that it’s the product of a single brain, but composer, multi-instrumentalist, and bandleader Trey Spruance says this kind of genre-hopping has fascinated him ever since he was a guitar-playing kid in his very first band.

“When I was 15, I was in a death-metal group, and we had this idea that we were going to play a bunch of ska tunes for a bunch of metalheads,” he recalls on the line from his Bay Area home. “We just had this idea, you know: ‘Okay, we’re going to play this ska music, and that’ll be amazing.’ Half of the audience hated us, but there was definitely a joy in confronting that wall between styles.”

Spruance laughingly dismisses his early exercise in perversity as a “juvenile expression” of his interest in mutant sound, but it’s worth noting that his beginner’s band was called Mr. Bungle. Fronted by the hyperactive, charismatic singer Mike Patton, that outfit soon went on to achieve cultlike status among listeners who liked their hardcore grind served up with a side order of theatrical chaos, and Spruance’s appetite for sonic excess has not diminished over time.
in + out

Trey Spruance sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.

On the driving force behind his obsessive music-making: “There isn’t a person who’s ever done anything who wasn’t motivated strongly by something—usually something that didn’t exist or that needed to exist. If you connect with something like that, there’s a symbiotic relationship that exists between you putting energy into it and then it drawing you more into itself.”

On the idea that his quick-change compositions might shock listeners into letting go of their musical preconceptions: “I wish I could say I had that much control over the reactions I’m getting out of people. But it is good that it happens. It’s not an intended effect, but it’s one I embrace.”

On tour mates Sleepytime Gorilla Museum: “They’re not just doing odd time signatures and atonal stuff: it works, and it kicks ass. It works on a very primal level, even though they’re doing all these extremely advanced and difficult things.”

He has, however, found some ingenious ways to harness his somewhat manic energies. Book of Horizons, for instance, is being sold as a Secret Chiefs 3 record, but it’s really the product of six different bands: Forms, Ishraqiyun, Traditionalists, the Electromagnetic Azoth, the Holy Vehm, and Ur. Each has its own identity: Ishraqiyun, for instance, reflects Spruance’s interest in Persian, Afghan, and Iraqi music, while the Holy Vehm is an over-the-top continuance of his early fascination with all things loud and cryptic.

This sounds like a studio-only conceit, but Spruance swears that each subproject has its own independent existence, and adds that several will be releasing their own CDs soon. “We’re halfway through tracking three records for three of the bands,” he says, “as well as simultaneously working on the next Secret Chiefs record. Essentially, what’s happening is that the idea behind this band keeps on expanding.”

Given that on Book of Horizons he’s credited with playing rabab, saz, santur, cheng, bass, microtonal guitar, sitar guitar, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, organ, Clavinet, piano, electric piano, tack piano, sampler, various synthesizers, and a truckload of small percussion instruments, it’s clear that Spruance needs this many projects just to utilize his varied skills. Less immediately apparent, however, is how he plans to present this enormous spectrum of music when Secret Chiefs 3 headlines Richard’s on Richards on Sunday (January .

Spruance notes that on previous tours the Chiefs tended to play three different sets, in three different instrumental configurations. On this outing, however, he’s presenting a kind of greatest-hits overview, accompanied by a pared-down cast of the musicians who helped him make Book of Horizons.

“Basically, we’re doing cover versions of all of these different songs from these different bands, and doing them much more succinctly than we have in the past,” he says. “I didn’t want to half-way do the different-bands idea; it’s better to just go out there and play, at least until we can get it together to actually do the separate-band thing.”

He adds that although he’d need a 120-piece orchestra to realize all of his musical ideas, he’s going to explore as many of them as he can within the somewhat compressed format of his touring sextet, which includes noted improviser Eyvind Kang on viola, Timb Harris on violin and guitar, Shahzad Ismaily on bass, Jai Young Kim on keyboards and guitar, and occasional Tom Waits sideman Ches Smith on drums. How, exactly, they’re going to get from the filmic pomp of Ur’s Exodus-theme cover to the venom fountain that is the Holy Vehm’s “Exterminating Angel” is anyone’s guess, but Spruance is convinced that neither his accomplices nor his listeners will have much difficulty making the leap.

“I just feel that stylistic restrictions are irrelevant, and they’ve always been irrelevant,” he says. “But at the same time the differences between things are what is beautiful. So you might rebel against being put into a box as a musician and want to break out of that, but at the same time there’s nothing better than trying to really understand how something as specific as, say, Persian music works.

“I’m also angered by how little of themselves or their consciousness musicians are putting into their music,” he continues. “And I’m not just talking about all those bad punk-rock bands, although I don’t accept that as a valid expression of anything. You have to put something very deeply connected to yourself into your music or else it’s not really working—unless it’s just for fun, and then it’s fine.”

Spruance, at least, has found a way to put all of himself into his music and have fun. Although he’s interested in the occult aspects of music, in the way that it can be a vehicle for healing, revelation, or communion with the infinite, he’s still that ska-crazed teen punk at heart—and, in his world, anything goes.

“I’ve stopped caring about what time signature anything is in or what key it’s in, and I’m really happy about that,” he says. “It’s like genres: you don’t really need to think about them so much. Music doesn’t have to be like that. You do have to learn these things; it’s important that you understand how the different kinds of feelings that you want to express will affect how you create your music. But getting to the point where you can let go of all the theory is great.”

I keep getting Secret Chiefs mixed up with Kaiser Chiefs. Do the Secret ones have something new out? I loved that one album they did.

pkidwell said:

It depends which one. Book M? Anyways, I wanted to point out the brilliant artwork because really there are few on his level. And how Trey has made his artwork into a meta puzzle that compliments this brilliant music. For instance one person saw something in a corner and he magnified it and turned out to be arabic script that was coded. Trey effs with your mind like that. That was one little fraction of the puzzle that was discussed.

It's been 2 years since the last project. So any month now things should click into place for the next release. And don't get me started on the madness that is ASVA

I like Bungle, dunno about Secret Chiefs 3