L-R: Daniel Ross-Moore, Corey Dunham, Meagan Dunham, Alletta Ergun and Overt Lexvold

From Tragic Beginnings, Mute Grey Seeks a New Approach to Life

Story by Angus McLinn

Mute Grey is a local band with an agenda. In the next few months they’re unleashing the full might of their DIY industrial metal juggernaut with a new album, tour plans, new merch, old names, a stage show to be reckoned with, and a guitarist with a knack for both interior decorating and the business aspect of being in a band. But for all their big plans, Mute Grey, like many other local acts, came from humble beginnings.

Meagan Dunham

It began with a family tragedy that resulted in guitarist Corey Dunham linking up with drummer Daniel Ross-Moore in 2001 through a support program. Despite its initial awkward and forced inception, their friendship soon blossomed over a shared love for music. The two soon began playing Linkin Park covers with Dunham’s sister, Megan, handling vocals which over the course of the next couple of years evolved into Octane, a precursor to Mute Grey.  

Daniel Ross-Moore

“We started really early, like in middle school, and everyone just made fun of us which was cool because we were pretty ridiculous.” Explains Daniel, recalling an Octane related incident that occurred when the two were attending Kromrey Middle School. “I remember hearing somebody put up some posters about Octane playing the library at school,” said Ross-Moore. The posters were quickly defaced, but, as Corey is quick to jokingly point out “That’s probably still the most press we ever got.”

Overt Lexvold

Once in high school, the group added Alletta Ergun on bass and Emily Van Haren on keyboards, who has since been replaced with Overt Lexvold, and soon after renamed themselves to their current moniker, Mute Grey. This was soon followed by the release of the group’s debut EP in spring of 2008, Two Minutes Hate and began getting some airtime on 94.1 JJO. As Ross-Moore explains, “That was a complete pain in the ass and horrible time. The band basically broke up in the middle of recording it because everyone was fighting…Then we kind of pulled it together and put that out and that’s when things really took off…like a year and a half ago.”

The release of the EP was followed by a summer of live shows, including several shows in Madison some higher profile out of state shows. “In those four or five months after we put out Two Minutes Hate, we finally starting putting out cards and more merchy [sic] kind of stuff, and we really started getting good shows. We opened for Mushroomhead and we opened for Hurt and some bigger bands 94.1 was bringing through.”  The band also played a small tour in Ohio with stops in Cleveland and Sandusky with Margin of Error as well as a few shows in Chicago, including a party atop a 60-story building. “It was a weird thing where you’re like, ‘wow I don’t know how the hell I ended up right now.’ There were ball players and Fallout Boy was there and shit,” explained Ross-Moore.

Corey Dunham

When questioned about the bands sudden success and display of business initiative, Corey explains: “I think a lot of it was we found our sound. That whole thing kind of started when we linked up with our original keyboard player because that’s a huge part of our sound undeniably…we had a good lineup at the time and we were all getting along really well…we were just on a roll for a few months.”

After a relatively inactive winter and spring, Mute Grey started recording their upcoming album, We Dream in Black and White, in the summer of 2009. “Our buddy told us that if we wanted to get anywhere we needed to write another album,” Corey says. “So me, Daniel, and Alletta started writing another album and we began recording it in August.” The band rehearsed for four or five months between four and five times a week, working on the album as well as recording at DNA studios as well as their own home studio. The new album is set to have eleven tracks and will be released in Spring 2010.

We Dream in Black and White adds a heavier edge to Mute Grey’s brooding and ethereal industrial metal meditations. Vocalist Meagan has also added screaming to her duties as the clean vocalist, replacing Daniel in this position both for logistical reasons and to add more fluidity to the music while maintaining the intensity the band strives for. The album will also add more percussive guitar in conjunction with driving drum work, giving Mute Grey’s sound more of a rhythmic counter point to the bands melodic vocals and keyboard sections, furthering the prevalent theme of juxtaposition in most of their music.

Additionally, the album will lyrically explore the ambiguous nature of good and evil. As Meagan explains, “The whole idea is that they’re the same thing…that black and white, good and evil can’t be separated. The logic behind it is that a person who does something evil, there’s a victim of that act and that victim will emerge from the experience with a different view of life and they will be determined not to put someone else through what they went through. Basically it makes them a better person, so through that chain of events the evil person who does something good, and the reverse can be said as well…the whole concept of the album is basically an exploration of that.” 

As well as exploring these themes lyrically, the songs will approach the issue as a whole, utilizing the heavy driving sound of the music to immerse the audience and induce an awakening intended to provoke thought. According to Meagan, these themes will be explored in both individual and institutional contexts. “Revolution in thought is really the whole idea, and that can apply to political thought as well,” explains Meagan. “I’m really tired of the partisan bickering and all that, I think it’s time for a new way of approaching politics and life in general.”  Lyrically, this is somewhat of a departure from Two Minutes Hate, which was more of a personal construction, although in songs such as “One and the Same” the themes of nihilism, isolation, and seemingly apocalyptic images of personal decline are blended with larger political themes, such as accountability.

In conjunction with their plans for a conceptually ambitious album, Mute Grey is  mobilizing their forces in the coming year in order to take their band to the next level, with business and logistics efforts directed primarily by Corey. The band’s practice space at Madison Music Foundry includes a several charts on the wall to chart progress of various aspects of band business, including recording and even gas expendentures. Even the light conditions are carefully regulated within the space in order to maintain a brooding, maroon glow. “You notice when you go into a kitchen or anything, the light on the ceiling in the middle of the room sucks in all situations. It totally kills the vibe in the room,” explains Corey. The band has also revamped it’s already robust stage show (as well as an impressive bag of theatricks, the band performs with such energy that bassist Alletta once suffered a black eye due to excessive rocking and an unfortunate collision with a tuning peg) and will include fog emitting platforms as well as a full scale light rig in addition to their customary carnivalesque stage makeup. There are also plans for a tour that expanding on the regional scale of their summer of 2008 activities to coincide with the release of  We Dream in Black and White as well as new merchandise.

All told, Mute Grey is enthusiastically pressing on into the future. “I just feel like there’s not anybody else out there that’s doing what we’re doing and I think that there’s still a significant we can appeal to so I think we can go as far as we want to take it” says Meagan. Her brother Corey shares her optimism:

“I think the music will eventually take it where it needs to go. I think the music is quite a bit better…I think we’ve essentially refined all the parts. This is pretty much the truest vision of what we wanted the band to be like, to this day obviously, and hopefully every album release will be that way. That it’s the best work you’ve done.”