Music Style Heavy ambient music.

Musical Influences everything

Similar Artists hard to pinpoint.

Artist History Long and uninteresting.

Group Members Jay Dawson - Vocals/Synth , Tre' Berney - Drums, Phillip Burns - Guitar, Chad Rogers - Bass

Instruments vocals, guitar, bass,drums, and synth

Albums the absence

Press Reviews Burying Boundaries: Pleuroma's pleased to do its own thing By Kevin Saylor April 12, 2002 East Tennessee's Pleuroma makes the sort of music that's apt to be thrown quickly into the art rock category. Its sounds are dark and ambient, with lengthy, musically complex songs that don't lend themselves easily to typical radio play charts. Pleuroma's well-crafted songs offer plenty of meat for those longing for more than the sugary, candy-coated shell of mainstream rock. Three of Pleuroma's four members - guitarist Phillip Burns, drummer Tre' Berney and bassist Chad Rogers - originally were part of an outfit called Alicin's Journal. "After Alicin's Journal split up," Burns recalls, "Chad, Tre' and myself decided to just keep getting together and playing without anything too serious. "The idea was more than fine with me because there were a lot of other areas of music that I wanted to try and never had the opportunity to with Alicin's Journal. It was like a breath of fresh air. The approach that we were taking was without boundaries and completely honest, something that none of us had ever been able to do because of all of the tension in the last band." After a few months, they decided their music needed words to go with it. It was then that vocalist Jay Dawson joined the band. Dawson and Rogers had met while studying computer animation and digital media at East Tennessee State University. Dawson's lyricism seemed like a natural fit with the band's music. Since Dawson joined nearly two years ago, Pleuroma has been hard at work. A year ago the band recorded a demo at Knoxville's Underground Studios. Not satisfied with the work, it went to the Clinton-based Tone Factory to redo some of the songs. The result is Pleuroma's first release, "The Absence," an eight-song collection scheduled to hit the streets by the end of the month. "It was just really odd when we got together; it was like we were in a room without any boundaries," says Dawson. "We were going to call this release 'The Absence,' partly because of the negative connotations of the yearning for someone but also for the positive connotations, of a lack of boundaries. There are some things that we feel pretty strongly about that we hope come across (in the music). "What we play and what we do is on our own accord. Whatever comes out of us, we're not trying to be a certain thing. We do it because we want to. I'm not out to prove a certain thing to anyone. We have some pretty strong ideologies about what we do. It's all about being part of that creative process. It almost becomes a fix." Pleuroma plans to tour the East Coast during late spring or early summer. The band has one show confirmed, with more dates on the way. "We're playing up at CBGBs in New York, and that should be pretty cool," says Dawson. "We're excited about that. (The other band members) had played up there a few times as Alicin's Journal. To play on the same stage as Hendrix and where all the other people have played is pretty exciting." Dawson notes the band plans on reentering the studio again soon. Future plans aside, Pleuroma is about one thing: making its own blend of music. "We just write music inspired by people or places that influence us and then leave it alone," says Burns. "We aren't trying to follow any kind of trend or pattern or any clever marketing scam. We just create music that we enjoy and try to share it with anyone who wants to listen. We're not out to be rock stars or local heroes. We're just four geeks who have the same love for music." 7/23/01 by pleuroma : nice and smooth blue guitar song ...something reminiscently upcoming from Trent Reznor to Neil Young ...looks like soundtrack for "Deadman" - Jim Jarmush movie(sorry if i`ve type names with wrong letters - i`m from RUSSIA) maxima artis kosmopolites http://www.mp3.com/MAXIMA_ARTIS_KOSMO Who can be found on Ness Alternative station. Heavy Rock Pleuroma ponders the meaning of life and the passion of music by Mike Gibson It's not often that a reporter's rap session with a group of local musicians—usually conducted as a precursor to an article such as the one you're now reading—delves into heady philosophical territory; the conversation more commonly centers on scenester gossip and shared substance abuse. But this reporter's recent audience with Knoxville rock band Pleuroma marked a refreshing break from custom, as our chat over a cup of exotic latte at a West Knox coffee hut veered from music to existentialism to the search for personal relevance in an increasingly impersonal world. The band's very name nods at these intellectual preoccupations; Pleuroma is a Gnostic, quasi-Jungian term (originally spelled "pleroma," or so says the band) perhaps best explained by drummer Tré Berney. "It refers to everything you can possibly pull into 'now'—this one particular moment, this infinitesimally small unit of time," says Berney, an amiable sort whose broad, soft face looks even younger than its 25 years. "When we came up with the name, we had almost decided to be an all-instrumental math-rock emo band. Kinda like, 'We'll be hip that way.'" "I guess it's safe to say that our music isn't meant for people with the attention span of the average sitcom viewer," adds burly bass player Chad Rogers. "When we write, we write until we feel like the point's been made." What he says is true. Pleuroma creates music that wreaks havoc with traditional verse-chorus convention, combining the power and directness of heavy rock with sonic exploration and substantive intellectual content. Berney calls it "heavy ambient rock," and that's an apt summary. The band's forthcoming local release, The Absence, is a jewel of alternating thunder and rumination, of soul-searching and intellectual struggle rendered in highly textured hard-rock orchestrations. Inevitably, that first release will invite comparisons to million-selling math-rockers Tool, whose music is in no small way akin to that of Pleuroma's. Berney attributes the sonic resemblance in part to the Maynard-esque wailings of singer Jay Dawson, in part to the deft production of local engineer Scotty Hoaglan, and in part to the nature of band's evolutionary process, which has already wrought considerable changes since the Absence tunes were written. To see just how far they've come, one only need look back to the mid '90s, when Berney, Rogers and guitarist Phillip Burns were the solid core of the five-piece Alicin's Journal, a Newport-based shock-rock outfit that unabashedly drew from the sound and antics of Marilyn Manson. The trio eventually tired of the Manson schtick, parted ways with their luridly-attired frontman, and began the long, slow process of finding both a new singer and a new direction. The search ended with the auditioning of Dawson, the 35th vocalist to answer the band's classified ad. "We didn't include any influences in the notice," Berney says. "We wanted someone who sings, rather than screaming all the time. And we were more concerned with ideas than style or talent." Dawson joined more than a year and a half ago, and the new foursome played its first show last summer. Since then, Pleuroma has performed a handful of times locally, mostly in West Knoxville, and managed one trek to New York City and a gig at infamous CBGB's, where Alicin's Journal once played. They've booked a second date at CB's this summer, opening for lower-East-Side hardcore outfit the Unsane. "People asked about CBGB's, like getting a show there was black magic or something," Rogers laughs. "Really, all it took was persistence. And a lot of phone calls." Though Pleuroma may play the occasional show at the Big Apple's most notorious alterna-venue, these fellows don't harbor any unwieldy expectations about their music-making. Berney, an employee at McKay's used bookstore, declares at one point that "I'd sign a permanent contract for $300 per week just to play drums the rest of my life." And when the discussion meanders back to weightier topics, he posits that the impact of his life and those of his bandmates will be measured not so much by the force of collision as by the magnitude of reverberation. "I'm totally fascinated by what it means to be a living animal in the post-industrial age," Berney enthuses. "We don't have to go out and pick beans anymore; it's like we're learning to live with ourselves now that we're not important in that way. We can stay home and pontificate and create. And that will be our legacy. What we're doing now will be our epitaph."

Location Knoxville, TN - USA

Copyright notice. All material on MP3.com is protected by copyright law and by international treaties. You may download this material and make reasonable number of copies of this material only for your own personal use. You may not otherwise reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, or create derivative works of this material, unless authorized by the appropriate copyright owner(s).