Bio
Twin Cities-band Kazyak is the indie craft-vehicle of songwriter/guitarist Peter Frey. The band has released 2 EPs and 5 LPs and the lineup includes: Peter Frey (guitar), Andy Wolfe (guitar), Pat Hayes (synth, piano), Mat Grewe (bass), and Nick Grewe (drums). The band finds its source in a deep pool of midwestern music, drawing on the abstract side of Bob Dylan’s songwriting and lofty sonic architecture from the likes of 12 Rods, Fat Kid Wednesdays, Tiki Obmar, and Halloween, Alaska. The group has shared the stage with many, including The War on Drugs, LA indie rockers Local Natives and Duluth-based Trampled by Turtles, and continues to collaborate closely with Minneapolis-based engineer/drummer Brett Bullion.
Discography
Easy As It Came (2023)
In Frey’s words, “we’ve explored so many genres in the last decade — from alternative and psychedelic music to folk and country — Easy As It Came is a bit more groovy, straight-ahead, feel-good rock n’ roll. It’s a blend of everything we love about funk, indie, and Americana.” As for music videos, the band has been exploring AI-generated art.
Shadow of a Cloud (2022)
Shadow of a Cloud is about the forces that move the world: coincidence, time, choices, truth, love. In many ways it is an acceptance that change is the only constant. The title is a direct reference to Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth, when Campbell recounts a letter written by a heroic Native American chief who acknowledges native culture and memories are to become merely a shadow of a cloud.
The band wrote the feels over a two month period after extended time apart due to the initial Covid lockdown. The following summer, the band hauled gear to Gol-Wop, Frey’s and Wolfe’s family cabin in the Northwoods of Minnesota, for an immersive recording experience. The music is straight-ahead rock, with alternative, psychedelic, and ambient elements. The album conjures David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Impressionist art.
Hand Me Down (2021)
Hand Me Down is Kazyak’s third LP and as indie rock as ever. This time the music is brighter, more optimistic, and puts the band’s strong personal connections on full display. Peter Frey (guitar) and Andy Wolfe (guitar) are cousins. Nick (drums) and Mat (bass) are brothers. Pat Hayes’ (synth) and Frey’s moms were college roommates and their dads have been best friends since childhood.
The album is a coming of age and the deep roots yield a personally and musically intimate experience. The concept is about how traits, habits, and memories are passed along from one’s parents, how one applies those learnings to the present, and ultimately what one leaves behind for future generations. The songs explore feelings of love, loss, adventure, addiction, and staying the course.
Odyssey (2019)
Odyssey is Kazyak’s most pioneering work yet, following the Happy Camping EP (2017) and the Reflection LP (2018). On the surface, Odyssey is extremely satisfying indie rock ear candy. Dig a little deeper and find intricate connections between lyrical, visual and aural elements. From guitarist/songwriter Peter Frey’s perspective, the album is “more rugged, forward-looking and psychedelic than our past releases. It’s the first record we’ve recorded live, and is channeling inspiration from Patagonia and themes from Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth. It attempts to capture the desire to explore and to take the listener to the edge of discovery.”
Kazyak is no stranger to taking chances with sound and Odyssey is proof. The songwriting is on the same level as past releases, but the focus here is that they’ve turned up the psychedelic knob several notches – wetter vocals, an orchestrated Prophet V and Juno 106 synth-combo, and heroic guitar hooks, held together by solid drums and bass. The album contains a countless string of highlights, beginning with Contravertical, a deep dive into the unknown. The fourth track, Camouflage, is a heavy-hitting stoner anthem about trying to blend in (things are moving really fast / it’s all part of the plan / said I’d kick the habit but I just kick the can). Track five, Zombie Dream, is the obvious single portraying a slow-core, zombie apocalypse dreamscape whose chorus cops the opening lines from Bob Dylan’s Mama You’ve Been on My Mind. And finally, Smoke Jumper offers a floaty, high-powered jam where listeners will feel swept off the ground by a strong breeze (feel the force of the lift / the direction and drift). With Odyssey, Kazyak gives listeners plenty to explore.
Reflection (2018)
Reflection is Kazyak’s debut full-length release. The album fits right in to the band’s evolving catalog, following the band’s first release See the Forest EP in 2015, a pick-up-the-pieces collection created after earlier music projects had ended abruptly, which was followed by the Happy Camping EP in 2017, a profession that the band had reached a steady, balanced state and was eager to carry on the musical collaboration. Songwriter/guitarist Peter Frey calls Reflection “An attempt to create surreal, vivid, Dali-esque images with our sound — it’s a collection of outtakes, demos, and b-sides consistent with our history of not-trying-to-be-mainstream alternative rock. They’re all true songs of scenery seen, dreams dreamt, and feelings felt, enlivened by layers of musical and visual, psychefied experimentation.”
Reflection was inspired by a trip Frey and his wife took to Chile and Argentina. The photography and video footage is primarily from the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile, featuring a bizarre, weathered, antiplano landscape with volcanoes, flamingos, salt flats, lagoons, wind turbines and the ALMA space observatory.
The album has an adventurous, restless attitude that detours into psychedelia. Even the odd meters feel tasteful and contribute to Kazyak’s creative ambition to push forward the limits of indie sound and songwriting. The LP blends a masterfully creative lineup that glues together electronic and acoustic drums, bass, guitars, and lush pockets of synth with Frey’s associative lyrics and someday-soon-will-be-nostalgic, maturing songwriting. The sound finds its roots in the 60s but has its eyes set on the future. Listeners will hear reminicings of Wilco, Yo La Tengo, Tame Impala, and Pink Floyd, while striving to craft a distinctly original sound of their own — attempting to replicate the uniqueness of the likes of Bob Dylan, Talking Heads, Gillian Welch, and the Grateful Dead.
Happy Camping (2017)
In the conventional sense, a happy camper is a comfortable, contented person. Happy Camping is Kazyak having reached this state in active form. “Everything is fine,” says songwriter/guitarist Peter Frey, “With Happy Camping, the band has reached a steady state with sound, lineup, age/maturity, and life. Simply, we’ve struck balance. The band is experiencing normalcy at a sustained pace.”
With Happy Camping, indie rock band Kazyak has taken a big step beyond picking up the pieces. As we were taken thick into the woods with the See the Forest release, Happy Camping seems the beginning of a great expedition. As Frey says, “It’s after you’ve put your pack on your back and set out walking down an unexplored trail, but before you’ve arrived to the foot of the mountain. This album is the long walk through the open field to the base of the mountain.” The music and inspiration are still deeply grounded in a natural setting, though this time, the forest burned down and this is the first wave of growth – the season is undoubtedly spring, the flowers are growing back, and there is no darkness or hint of death.
Frey wrote the songs in the months that led up to his wedding. As part of a pre-wedding get-away, he and his wife-to-be visited Alaska, where they helicoptered from the foot of a melting basin to set up camp atop the glacier. The trip marked an inventive approach to making peace with the past, entirely unhooking it from the future ahead. In search of balance and a steady-state, Frey and the band seem to have found it.
On Happy Camping, Kazyak’s sound evokes a type of Experimental Americana. The album is dubbed by Frey as the band’s ‘country record’, using simple guitar/bass/drums orchestration to imitate Gillian Welch and David Rawlings’ ‘slow heartbeat’ approach to feel. The lineup is Frey on nylon/acoustic/electric guitars, long-time friend and bassist Lana Bolin, and drummer/engineer Brett Bullion – who together display a tightness that entwine hooks, lines, and visceral textures.
See the Forest, See the Trees (2014)
Frey wrote the songs of See the Forest, See the Trees during a period of creative hibernation in the Great Room of his childhood home. The album’s music and narrative were inspired by the snowy oaks and icy pond in the backyard, and are about isolation, expression, recovery, and patience. The record is an anthem dealing with the refusal of the past to disappear from us irrespective of our desire to have it leave us.
See the Forest, See the Trees chronicles the famous Remus folktale Tar Baby, a child-like aphorism for a problem than only worsens by attempts to solve it. The album’s title is a variation on the old adage of “not seeing the forest for the trees,” striving to simultaneously mind the finer details and the big picture. Each song is a snapshot, a thread in a tapestry, and though you never get the sense that there’s a rigid theme or set of rules to the story, you can’t help but feel that each song is connected on multiple levels.