A Place To Kill releases explosive debut EP

A couple of weeks ago, Richard Patrick was kicking around downtown Phoenix. No, Filter fans, you didn’t miss a show; that longtime band’s frontman was here on some other noisy business.

Together with Phoenix artist Jim Louvau — noted photographer, videographer, and singer of industrial-metal band There Is No Us — the pair was preparing for a raucous sound detination.

Just a couple of days after I chatted with the two at Louvau’s studio, the pair debuted their new band, A Place to Kill (APTK), with the release of a ballistic self-titled EP and the unleashing of a video, via Revolver magazine, for the track, “Jet Engine.” Patrick handles the synths, beats, and background vocals, and Louvau is the lead vocalist.

It’s blistering music for scorching times. A gripping, ear-shredding industrial-trap metal blend that offers a shroud for your screams, motivated by the heightened societal ills plaguing humanity at the moment. Not to compare, because it stands like a cement tower on its own legs, but at first listen to “Jet Engine,” I told everyone who would listen — my friends, the dog, a fucking doorknob — that it was the first thing since its release that reminded me of Ministry’s “The Land of Rape and Honey,” in both sound and energy.

It’s the kind of record you step into and let it sweep you up. In between the vocals, the fury of the music lets up and gives you breathing space so you can catch your breath and jump back in, whether you’re having a completely cerebral listen with earbuds or on a chaotic dancefloor. Its whispers, breaks, and sharp edges keep you in the musical maze.

“I wouldn’t say it’s overly political,” Patrick tells Signal and Noise. “But, it is reflective of a society that’s gone crazy. It’s artistically our vision of the world from our perspective. I mean, for instance, you’re gonna dump a billion carcinogens into the air, pollute the world, and then say climate change is a hoax. Things like that. Or the way things have crumbled into this uncivil mocking of each other.”

“Essentially, the world is crumbling, and we’re the soundtrack.”

It’s a creative union that was forged before they ever joined forces in the studio. Once upon a time, Louvau interviewed Patrick for a publication, and another time, he treated Patrick to the depths of his scream, shouting Filter lyrics to him on the band’s tour bus after a Phoenix show. Louvau’s holler got locked into Patrick’s brain. By virtue of what they do, they kept finding themselves in the same orbit.

“By having mutual friends, we kept running into each other, and there was always an interest in working together,” Patrick says.

Eventually, Patrick invited Louvau to do some vocals on a song called “‘Murica,” where he says Louvau came into his studio and “destroyed my microphone (laughs), so I knew what he could do. I was working on this other electronic music that definitely was different than Filter, and I thought ‘Jim would be perfect to sing over this.’ We gave it a shot. The first song we worked on was called “The Killing Field,” and it sounded great — it just tore my head off,” he says.

Patrick adds that the comfort between the two musicians was inherent and another step in their organic, evolving relationship.

“I’m discovering like a lot of things Jim can do beyond just sit there and scream at me (laughs), you know what I mean? He’s worried about arrangement, he’s worried about song structure. He comes up with ideas and mentions things to me, and it’s wonderful. And even singing-wise, his whispers or when he sings low, he’s adding more inflections on even the newer stuff that we’re working on right now. So there are all kinds of exploratory developments that happen.”

Louvau concurs.

“We really haven’t even butted heads on really anything. We’ve been working with a lot of the same people for years, or whatnot, before we started working together. And it’s really important that when we first started even talking about trying to work together, it was not necessarily, ‘Hey, let’s put a band together.’ It was like, let’s get in the studio and write some songs and see how it goes and see if it’s a good time and see, you know, kind of what comes out of it. But there was no pressure to have any expectations,” he says.

He is also digging the new insights. “When we first started shooting videos, we had never stood next to each other doing that. There are so many discoveries that, from the time we made the “Jet Engine” video to what we’ve done over the past few days, we have evolved quite a bit since he came in here the first time…

The same way that we’ve kind of evolved from the first song up until what we’re working on for the next EP. The funny part is that to me, a lot of the stuff we’re talking about the world, and of the overall human experience, a lot of these songs were written, you know, three, four years ago. Some of the stuff in the songs only kind of became more true. Some of it felt almost like we were predicting things that weren’t overly hard to predict, but while it took us a little longer to get this record out, it’s even more relevant now,” Louvau adds.

Another thing the duo agrees on is not trying to push any message to their audience. Just as they have grown organically, they want listeners to take what they need.

“I feel that is for them to decide. It’s none of my business. I hope they enjoy it. I think everyone will take something different from it, which is the point of art. There may be people who are confused at first (he laughs), because both our bands go down very different avenues than this,” Lovau says, as we dig into the value of artists being multidimensional and expansive.

At some point, this human fusion will turn into a live show, too, but true to their nature, they’re not rushing anything. When that happens, don’t expect them to have a full band set up. They’re keeping it a two-piece and are looking forward to seeing what that looks like.

“I’m going to have a bevy of electronics on stage, and Jim’s going to be running around all over the place. We expect it to be more like an EDM show than a rock one,” Patrick says.

Louvau laughs. “I’ve always loved the idea of being able to run around the stage, not tripping other musicians or them tripping me — ‘cause it happens — there’s chaos in everything I do musically,” he says.

Now that the first screeching cat is out of the bag, this team is ready for everything that comes next, including more videos and another EP in the fall.