Every spring, the hundreds of tree peonies that reside in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens erupt in pastel puffs of pink, purple, white, and yellow. The reverence of these tissue paper-like flowers might make a passerby pause and consider qualities like resilience or tenderness or renewal. But on this day in early May, such serenity is broken by a recitation of a summary of a long-shuttered off-off-Broadway play entitled Lord of the Cock Rings Part I: Fellowship of the Cock Ring.
“Scroto Baggins, a computer programmer from Secaucus, New Jersey, is magically transported to Middle Earth after purchasing a mysterious cock ring,” Empath drummer Garrett Koloski reads off his phone, howling with laughter and wobbling precariously close to a mossy pond. Bubbly keyboardist Emily Shanahan and Randall Coon, a soft-spoken synth playing giant, double-down on the giggles to the point where they’re actively interrupting other visitors’ tranquil strolls. Singer and guitarist Catherine Elicson hides behind her long blonde hair and inches away in embarrassment, in a hopeless attempt at trying not to laugh. In retrospect, it’s totally unclear how this weird-ass parody entered the conversation, which tends to be how things roll with Empath. The four friends can riff endlessly.
We’re here at the botanical garden because the quartet has a thing for nature: Their merch is adorned with the slogan “music for plants,” their posters are decorated in doodled flora, and their Tumblr is full of abstract pansies and roses. The second we step into the place, they rush to shove their noses into a Japanese Wisteria, huffing the floral scent with a desperation that makes me question the plant population of Philadelphia, their adopted home.
Empath also gladly invite the elements into their music. Take “The Eye,” a highlight from their recent tape Liberating Guilt and Fear, which opens with the soothing sound of birdsong before bursting into a candy-coated, noise-pop cacophony. Or “III,” the record’s nine-minute sound collage that pairs an aviary’s worth of frantic bird trills against a maelstrom of swirling feedback; sometimes it’s tough to tell what is an actual living noise and what is a manmade instrument chameleoning itself as something organic. But no matter how aggressively the chirping is smothered by a deluge of distorted guitars and breakneck percussion, the feathered creatures always manage to poke their heads out of the sonic ashes.
Several days later, Empath gather at a Lower Manhattan bar, happy hour margaritas in hand. The foursome conversate like a pile of puppies, talking over each other excitedly, but respectfully, always ready to counter an awkward story.
Between talk of serial killer zodiac signs and maximum security prisons, a band origin story begins to develop. Koloski and Shanahan both attended college in Syracuse, where Koloski played drums with noise rockers Perfect Pussy. In the fall of 2015, the pair moved into a massive seven bedroom house in West Philadelphia, where one of their new roommates was Elicson, who had just relocated from Columbus, Ohio. They became fast friends and soon started playing music together, “just jamming weird jazz shit in the basement for hours,” recalls Koloski. When Perfect Pussy quietly called it quits in January 2016, the trio formed Empath.
The band cut their first couple of releases, Crystal Reality and Crystal Reality Vol. II, in their basement using a field recorder later that year. Despite some rough edges—vocals recorded into an iPad, Elicson’s guitar and Koloski’s drums merging into a fuzz bomb—something precious emerged from the ramshackle, handcrafted tracks.
While working on their next record, Empath added Coon on synths and developed a collective interest in Solfeggio frequencies, a sacred tone scale believed to alter moods and balance energies. They began tuning an electric Shruti Box (an Indian harmonium-like instrument that produces steady drones) to 396 Hz, the frequency meant to liberate guilt and fear. Whether or not the record physicalizes these sensations is up for debate, but Liberating Guilt and Fear’s four tracks undoubtedly invite listeners to lose themselves.
There’s no way to listen to the EP without picturing the collaborative toiling necessary to create such intricate tangles of rabid drums, jangly keys, and vicious guitars. But upon closer look, every individual piece offers the same sense of wonder, especially on “The Eye.” Its accelerated hook and Elicson’s shouted chorus—“You don’t have to spend all of that money on me baby!”—are deceptively infectious, gripping their twinkling claws far deeper into your brain than you would initially assume possible.
Serendipity comes up many times when talking with Empath, and not just because the band regularly discusses horoscopes. “It’s funny to think about how everything really fell into place,” Koloski says. For instance: The home Shanahan and Koloski often crashed at while touring with Perfect Pussy turned out to be the home they now share with Elicson. And the first night Elicson and Koloski officially met, at the Brooklyn venue Silent Barn, the place caught on fire. “That really set the tone for the friendship,” Elicson adds with a laugh. Perhaps we have to thank fate that this strange group of friends found each other through the noise of life, and then started making some noise of their own.
Emily Shanahan: My role is to make sure we get in nature and have enough snacks.
Catherine Elicson: I’m the one with the spreadsheets and the anxiety.
Garrett Koloski: I make sure that everything is a joke so everything has less pressure.
Randall Coon: I wire up the van mufflers.
CE: Randall is the handy one; he’s a hard worker. Emily’s the one who gets in all the fights. She’s loyal to an extreme degree.
ES: My Mercury is in Aries so sometimes I get sassy. Literally anyone can make fun of me, but when it comes to my friends I get really upset.
ES: We actually tried to take a collective aura picture in Chinatown, but they wouldn’t let us.
GK: Afterwards I was convinced on getting a credit card just to max it out so I could buy an aura camera. We could bring it on tour!
RC: Short answer: That shit would be purple.
GK: It would be amethyst.
CE: Or transparent purple.
GK: After Perfect Pussy, I decided I’m only going to be in bands with my best friends, people that I really love and respect. Because you spend so much time with your bandmates, it’s important to put friendship first and be emotionally available. I would never tour relentlessly again.
CE: Three of us live together, and I feel like the band would have broken up if we didn’t get along. It’s not like we are in a band so we get along, it’s like we get along so we’re in a band. Sometimes a band that hates each other can produce really cool music for others to enjoy. But we prioritize each other’s feelings more than anything else.
CE: It’s from a collection of her poems called An Atlas of the Difficult World. Sometimes I just need inspiration for lyrics and will grab a book and thumb through it until something jumps out at me. None of the songs are literal. I usually don’t know what songs are about until a few months after I’ve written them. The first few songs on the Crystal Reality stuff were all about this really transitional period when I was moving. Generally there’s a lot of things about anxiety too. I like to use a pop structure as a place to start. It’s nice to have that constraint. When I wrote “The Eye,” I had been reading about pop industry tricks, like how everything hits at the same time for the chorus.
GK: Which is every Phil Spector song.
CE: True. So I had to change the way that I sing it so that all the instruments and the vocals started together. Then also just throwing the word “baby” in there is a pop-song secret. I was like, “Cool, that sounds sexy and weird.”
CE: Both of those bands write in major keys, so their music is really chaotic and frenetic but joyous. I like just having the contrast of playing heavy music, but it not being dark, or sad. I rely a lot on balance—if there's too much noise you’ve gotta have a chill moment. Sometimes I see a band and think it would be cooler if they got quiet just for a second.
CE: The voice on “No Attachments” [from Liberating Guilt and Fear] is from some new age audiobook on YouTube. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to find it again. A lot of the organ and tubular bells on the cassettes are all from The Exorcist.
GK: We were in the studio watching The Exorcist muted and we decided to turn the sound on and pitch shift and distort it.
CE: And the bird sounds are from YouTube, and we ran them through a pedal.
RC: I remember watching early Empath shows, before I was in the band, and they would play over nature documentaries showing a fox in the woods.
GK: I had two or three of the Environments records: One of them is just wind, one is just an ohm chant, one sounds like a crackling fire. I thought we should rip them off.
CE: Our Environments is two proper singles and two associated noise tracks; a wind side and a water side. Although I love pop music, I feel more inspired by orchestral arrangement. You listen to it from front to back in one big movement.
GK: There’s a noise jazz part at the end of that we originally played for an hour. We were just blissed the frick out, drinking a box of wine.
