21-07-2025
Live Wire: Eyrie House Ruins bring ‘gothic folk' to Easthampton
EASTHAMPTON — There are plenty of hybrid musical styles: country rock, folk pop, acid jazz, ska punk and many more.
But local musician Rikk Desgres might have invented a new one: gothic folk.
'We had a hard time describing the genre of our music,' Desgres said in a recent interview with The Republican. 'We discussed the topic, and we settled on gothic folk.'
This new genre seems like a perfect dovetail with the group's name: Eyrie House Ruins. The name, of course, is taken from the well-known Holyoke landmark, where a hotel owned by William Street burned to the ground in 1901, and still contains the stones of what was to be a new building that was never completed.
Desgres has often mused among the ruins, 'What if the entire thing didn't burn down.'
'I love history. Especially local history. I have hiked to the Eyrie House Ruins many times,' he said. 'To relate Street's experience and his hard times, Eyrie House Ruins lyrical topics are usually dark with topics of misunderstood people, drink, religion, and of course the murder ballad.'
The project has been a decade in the making. Desgres found himself listening to gothic country bands such as Slim Cessna's Auto Club, 16 Horsepower and Tarantella, all from the Denver, Colorado, music scene. The lyrics of this bands focus on dark themes such as death, loss and the supernatural.
'It was part country, folk, Southern gothic, Eastern European music and rock all blended together. This intrigued me and I thought about starting a band up with these ideals,' he said. 'It was difficult to find people who wanted to do this type of music. Most people were into heavy metal or rock or country or bluegrass but not everything jumbled up in a blender like this.'
The group had a few false starts, but finally settled in with the current band about a year and a half ago.
'Jay Barns, our drummer,was in it from the inception. I knew (banjoist) Val Brown from the rock scene as a guitar player, and wanted to play with her in the past, but timing never worked out. I saw her posting songs on a banjo and asked her if she was interested in this crazy project. She was,' Desgres said. 'Val knew Kelsey Peake, our violin player, and Jim Pion, our bass player, answered an ad on Facebook.'
The band plays a smorgasbord of music, including both originals and covers. The covers range from artists as diverse as Townes van Zandt to Motörhead. Desgres explained the process of how they choose the covers.
'Because we all come from rock backgrounds, it's fun to transform rock songs into our version of gothic folk. We just started playing 'A Forest' by The Cure, a song I thought about for this project for a while. The violin does the synth part, and the banjo does a hybrid of what the guitar and synths do,' Desgres said.
But how does the band make such a wide-ranging scope of music fit under one musical umbrella?
'They fit because we play them. Our sets usually start out mellow, some Towns Van Zandt, Hank Williams mixed with similar originals, and at the end of the set we play Motörhead and The Cure along with similar originals. It seems to work quite well,' Desgres said. 'But we can also play to the bill we are on. When we get paired up with rock bands we tend to play the more aggressive songs. If paired with more eclectic bands we can play more mellow songs.'
When it comes to the original songs, Desgres brings in the songs as demos for the band to learn.
'I create full band demos with everyone's part worked out. Each member will learn their part, but are free to improve upon what I created in the demo,' he said.
Eyrie House Ruins is finishing up its debut album and hopes to release it in the fall. The band will play Luthier's Co-op, 108 Cottage St. in Easthampton, on July 26. The band goes on at 8 p.m.
Read the original article on MassLive.
Solve the daily Crossword
