MYTHS

Having thoroughly freaked us out with last year's self-titled album, shadow-lurking electro-noise duo MYTHS are back with an ambitious new project: a live electronica opera called The Golden Dawn, which they will premiere at Vancouver's World Art Centre at SFU Woodwards on January 28.

A Facebook event describes the show like this: "Pulling from far-reaching influences such as ballet and improvised dance, our obsession with the unknown, and the cycles of ancient mythology, The Golden Dawn weaves a story through their extended and remixed set of songs, noise improvisations and distorted narratives."

On their website, the band added, "This will be a special one-of-a-kind show that will play like a theatre piece. We'll have dancers, many new costumes, new visuals, all set to narrative and noise. If you heard us talking about our 'pop opera', this is it."

Tickets for the event are $12 in advance ($15 at the door) and can be purchased here.

In case you were wondering, the Golden Dawn were a British magical order. Read about them here. In other words, it doesn't look like these ladies have grown any less infatuated with the occult. - Exclaim!

I’m going to make one thing very clear – last night’s show at the Electric Owl was entirely feminine. Now take what imagery your mind conjures up when confronted by the concept of feminine and replace it with the bloodied jaws of a two headed lioness laced with your entrails. Each head of our beast belongs respectively to the performing artists of last nights experience, Grimes and MYTHS – both the adorable, yet deadly natural predator to stale artistic conventionalism.

Forsooth, I had never heard of MYTHS prior to this night. The Vancouver based female duo is a bedroom project in the same way nightmares are created, and to label them as simple noise punk is inappropriate. Their music equally conjured up emotions of terror and love only in ways possibly by breaking down the walls between musical expression and post-modern visual arts. Deceitfully cute, the petit pair intrigued us in self-styled bride-of-Beetlejuice inspired gowns, smattered violently with neon black light paint – hand made sets and costumes are uniquely combined visual elements that round out the distinctive performers shows. I felt like a vagrant caught without mercy in a dark back alley by the leather clad hands of a serial killer as the duo unsheathed their stabbing brand of utilitarian synth driven electro noise that borderlined on Bauhaus in the effectiveness of its design. Reverb is an understatement when it came to the liquid vocals that dripped like the viscous sheen that coats the walls of lost subterranean caverns. An expression that was not for everyone – fear the unknown – unintelligible hecklers chided the terrifying cuties as a knee jerk response to the confrontational nature of MYTHS’s tunes, but the duo was ultimately met with waves of applause by the majority of the ceaselessly stunned audience.

Punk rock inspired, I can only describe their tracks as the bastard marriage of the playful avant-garde electronic noise of Crystal Castles to the eerie bowels of German fear-industrial group Wumpscut. All with an abrasively adorable coat, MYTHS painted us the scene of a gruesome accident too compelling to look away. Since creating genres is one of my favourite things to do, I’m creating a new one for MYTHS right now and calling it Neo Feminist Post Industrial Unicorn Death. - Scene In The Dark

As scary—actually, make that fucking terrifying—as they sound on record, the two women known as Myths couldn’t be more delightful in person. This has been known to confuse some of those they come across.

“People are always very surprised,” reveals Quinne Rodgers, the diminutive, bleached-blond half of Myths. “They’ll meet us before we play, and then tell us after that they were expecting us to go up with acoustic guitars and sing nicely. Or they will hear about us or see us, and then afterwards be completely surprised we are nice.”

Lief Hall, the dark-haired half of what might be the best young band in Vancouver, is eager to elaborate: “I don’t remember who wrote this, but I remember hearing this quote about writing and it was ‘Keep the drama on the paper.’ I always liked that quote because it seems really relevant. Whenever my life is really dramatic it seems to stifle my creativity. And so, if I can keep the drama on the paper, and my life clear-headed and focused and positive, then that allows me to explore the darker realms of my subconscious.”

Indeed, the only thing that’s frightening about the women of Myths on the night the Georgia Straight meets up with them is the house that they are sharing. (Hall lives there full-time; Rodgers is crashing there temporarily.) Located on a nondescript stretch of businesses on the East Side, the eerily gothic home is like something from a Stephen King novel, the paint peeled right down to the weather-beaten wood. Myths’ eponymous debut was dreamed up, incubated, and fine-tuned in the decidedly creepy basement.

The record is one of those rare beasts that transcend genres. Over the course of seven hypnotizing, relentless tracks, Rodgers and Hall come across as sonic alchemists who’ve never met a shade of black they didn’t like. Funeral-service goth, synapse-frying electronica, shock-treatment no-wave, and postapocalyptic industrial all collide to create a hyper-textured nightmare.

Fittingly, along with a steady diet of horror films, old Crass records, and underground art of all disciplines, nightmares are a major obsession of Myths. “We both have a dark undercurrent,” offers Rodgers. “We both talk a lot about the messed-up nightmares that we have.”

This statement leads to a long and involved recounting of a recent dream where both had an experience right out of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

“Okay, this is cool,” Hall says excitedly. “We actually had this dream the other week that was related, on the same night, even though we weren’t in the same house. It was like Quinne’s dream continued my dream.”

The Coles Notes version of that dream had Hall taking a plane to a foreign location, getting questioned by customs, loaded into a paddy wagon for further interrogation, picking up Rodgers along the way, and waking up five stories above a barren warehouse, which both were forced to climb down to on a rickety ladder. Rodgers kept telling Hall, who has a fear of heights, “You can do this.” In the warehouse, SWAT–like officers used batons with glowing-red electrical ends to zap the members of Myths, leaving both unable to walk, after which—their legs fucked up and jutting off at inhuman angles—they were ordered to produce papers they didn’t have.

Rodgers continues: “And then I had a dream that we were both in jail and somehow I got a machine gun, got out of the jail cell, and ended up walking down the street shooting everything.”

Playing amateur psychologist for a second, one might infer from such a tale that the bandmates have become so close that they’re starting to share the same brain. Even if that’s not the case, there’s no denying that Myths is a solid team effort, Rodgers and Hall sweating out every richly textured detail of every song.

“We kind of have a thing where, with everything that Myths puts out, we both have to agree on it,” Rodgers says. “We end up challenging each other constantly.”

The band started out as a bedroom project, playing songs that they now describe as light and cute. “Because we didn’t have a jam space,” Hall says, “we had to be quiet. We’d play our stuff on little laptop speakers, whispering the parts to each other.”

When Hall moved into her haunted-looking East Side house, things began to get loud and dark, partly because—being on a commercial strip—the two were suddenly at liberty to turn up the volume. Songs would mutate further once Myths got them loaded into the computer.

“It was definitely a long process,” Rodgers reveals. “It wasn’t just like we knew exactly what the record was going to be and then we just made it. There was a lot of adding sounds on and then taking them off again.”

The result is an album that, if there’s any justice, will be remembered as a local-music landmark, with blackhearted monsters like “Deadlights” and “Goldbase” built out of strobes-in-the-mortuary synths, bombastic death-dance percussion, and intertwined howling-banshee vocals. For every heavenly interlude (think the echo-drenched, layered vocals that drift across the buzz-bombed “The Horizon”), there are moments that make you think you’ve somehow landed somewhere south of hell (consider the skull-rattling exercise in sonic exorcism that is “Prism Portraits”).

While the sound of Myths has evolved in the two years that the band’s been together, what’s remained constant from the start is the way the songs have been carefully designed to send strong messages, reflecting Rodgers and Hall’s interest in feminist politics. It’s up to listeners to decode what they are talking about, a challenge considering the lyrics are anything but black-and-white.

“We write the lyrics and then we discuss every line,” Hall says. “It’s a pretty intense process. There’s a huge tapestry of ideas that goes into each song, but it’s a tapestry that’s meant to be explored and interpreted.”

Rodgers adds: “I don’t think that it’s interesting to go, ‘This is a song about this, and that’s what it’s about.’”

Take, as an example of this, “The Labyrinth”, a voices-from-another-dimension marvel that’s all ghostly washes of synth and machine-gun drum violence. Given lyrics like “We take all the children/And we bury them in the garden” and “The day would come/When we would roam through the night/The trees bend back from our empty eyes,” one might logically assume that Hall and Rodgers simply put one of their nightmares to paper.

Instead, when pushed for a detailed breakdown, the two reveal that the track touches on the ritual acts of marriage and killing, mythical legends and Minotaur-like beasts, and how well-intentioned acts can be completely destructive.

“One of the things that we were thinking was residential schools, and the idea of trying to save a culture by breaking up its family structure,” Hall says. “How an imposed, violent, supposed act of love can destroy a people and a culture.”

That’s a sign that, as interesting as things are on the surface with Myths, when you dig deep you get to something truly fascinating. Not to mention, if you think about it, scary. - The Georgia Straight

While patrons of Wyrd II recovered from the incipient haze of coupled diffraction, MYTHS continued to shatter clusters of electro canon with their twin bellows of choralic thunder. Their dense pulses of vocal quanta wrap a quantized drum militia into piercing sinusoids of vibronic hollarama. The resulting hysteria will churn through crinked necks as fiending grippers clutch the delicately packaged disc within the myst of their hypnotic dance. - Weird Canada

I became too engrossed in the superlatives and constant praise which slowly deafened my ears. Your sweet and soft tongue, coated with exaltation, would twist and turn - churning compliments and adoring accolades. With each word, every shrill vocalization, I would feel the defenses I build soon give way. That stable and cemented fort which I had so painstakingly constructed bit by bit was overtaken by the flattering forces - your screeching, shrieking lauding artillery. Trusting the charlatan, I had exposed my weakness. For years I had safeguarded my fragile and feeble heart. Before you, I stood, weak from your cacophonous urging, your masked and perverse intent, I felt my heart ripped out of my aching chest. Fully conscious and frightened, I gripped the edges of the rib cage, parting my flesh like a curtain, hoping to spoon whatever I had left of myself inside. And as I fell to the ground, unwilling to accept defeat, I could feel your sinewy fingers around my neck, twisting and pushing, crushing my very will to speak. Biting my tongue, I wished no longer to survive. Barbaric baron. Convincing, conniving count.

MYTHS’ is an electronic band from Vancouver that makes experimental, electronic/apocalyptic, dystopic rave music. Part dark with hints of noise and kaleidoscopic elements, vocals shriek, and echo - yelping as they transform into impish enchantresses over crunching, fuzzy instrumentation. Their yowling voices climb over the noise and chaos - coaxing, urging, pleading for your cooperation. Once you are agree, fully surrendered and disarmed, you are willingly and joyfully dissected. Amiable aural assault. Thunderous thaumaturges.

My new favorite music//
- Unholy Rhythms

Pop culture has taken a decidedly darker direction in the past few years. This trend has manifested itself lately in a widespread fascination with the occult. Cryptic, creepy videos like Jay-Z’s “On to the Next One” have been accompanied the pervasive Jay-Z-as-Illuminatus theories. Clothing labels like Mishka and Actual Pain have brought horror-movie imagery to the mainstream. Witch house, championed by buzz magnets Salem and Mater Suspiria Vision, is the nascent boutique genre of 2010.

We’re starting to see effects of this shift close to home. One group that’s reacting to this change is Myths, which recently emerged from the ashes of seminal Vancouver noise-punks Mutators. Ostensibly, they’re products of the witch house movement, and to an extent, they embrace that label. Yet they insist their vision is radically different than other groups under witch house’s black umbrella.

Of the two members of Myths, Lief Hall and Quinne Rodgers, neither had heard about witch house until it was brought up in our interview. I couldn’t blame them. Their music, while employing a couple common tropes of witch house—wavering acid synths and pounding drum-machine beats—steers clear of witch house’s syrupy drone. They also display a fondness for vocalizing that most witch house artists lack. Their experiments marry the panicked shriek of Mi Ami’s Daniel Martin-McCormick with the pained wail of AIDS Wolf’s Chloe Lum. In other words, they sing harsh.

But as I described some of the main qualifiers of the witch house scene: the abstract symbolism, the focus on visuals, the intuitive creation method—they found plenty of thematic commonalities. They make an active attempt to harness the power of the symbol—“They do have a power behind them, and people need to take it back,” said Hall. They see visuals as central to the art they create—“It almost affects people more than audio a lot of the time,” said Rodgers, who also acknowledges how art needs to be spontaneous and intuitive. “Meaning evolves through creation,” she said. “With art, it just feels right, and creates meaning that we didn’t necessarily know about.”

But there’s a certain idiosyncrasy to their creation method. While they play up these elements in their art, they also shy away from total abstraction. “We totally think through everything we do. Everything has absolute meaning and purpose. Everything we do is meant to be examined. It’s there for the purpose of creating a dialogue.”

It’s difficult to decipher any clear themes in Myths’ musical cacophony. If anything, their music suggests a surrender to the abstract. “You’re not real; you’re not really real,” they howl on “Deadlights.” But it’s hardly fitting to take lyrics like that at face value. There’s more to Myths than croaked-out lyrics and fuzzy synths. Although they insist that every aspect of their art is carefully managed, it’s tough to imagine they carefully thought through their shrieking patterns.

They differ from many witch house artists as well, in that they get out of their bedrooms once in a while to play live. In fact, while most witch house acts are content to hide behind a mask of online anonymity and drop EPs on Mediafire every now and then, Myths has one piece of public material to their name, a four-track mini-CD that is exclusive to their merch table. While they have a clear musical vision that, on some level, they try to carefully craft, the spontaneity of their live performance is their raison d’être.

Their relationship with witch house is most curious upon examining their relationship to witches. While witch house’s view of witches owes its greatest debts to Dario Argento’s lurid Mother of Tears trilogy and occult Hammer gems like The Devil Rides Out, Myths has a personal connection with witches: Hall’s mother is Wiccan. Although she didn’t start researching Wicca until a couple years ago, she draws most of her perspective on the occult from Wicca’s earthy neopagan roots rather than Argento’s cryptic evil—although she does admit to being a big Suspiria fan.

Over the course of the interview, Hall is most enthusiastic when discussing how Myths attempts to deconstruct darkness. She cites an American study that found children to have universally negative, fearful perceptions on witches and ties it to a fear of strong women. It’s times like this when that clarity of thought Hall mentions really shines through. Myths might make abstract music, but it’s certainly rooted in concrete ideas. Both Hall and Rodgers have strong feminist ideals, and when taking this into context, their elaborate act, complete with stage costumes, improvised noise and larger-than-life imagery, kind of starts to make sense. They’re trying to reclaim the idea of witches. They’re trying to recontextualize darkness.

“Everything we used to sing about was so negative. We deal with negative issues, but we try to create a positive response to them. The music might not come across as positive, but it’s about addressing issues, seeing things for what they are, knowing you’re strong enough to deal with them, or whatever.”

“Or whatever–” this lack of verbal clarity is what I’ve come to expect from Myths—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Myths may not be able to articulate their grand vision on stage, but whatever indeed. Their resistance to conventional classification makes their vision all the grander.
- Discorder

Thanks to fantastic live sets and some downright haunting music, darkened synth pop duo MYTHS have been on our radar for a while. Now, the Vancouver duo of Quinne Rodgers and Lief Hall (formerly of noise punk destroyers Mutators) are finally delivering their self-released, self-titled full-length debut.

The album, which is currently streaming here in our Click Hear section and below, has been a long time coming, but as the band tell Exclaim!, they're more than a little pleased by the results.

"With Mutators and with a lot of bands, you pump stuff out really fast. You record it, do it and then you're done with it," she says. "Maybe there are things you don't like and you just deal with that, but for us, in the end when [the MYTHS album] was done, we felt so good about it. We feel like this is a solid thing we can get behind, which is a really amazing experience."

Over various recording sessions with Felix Fung, Fine Mist's Jay Arner and self-recording at the band's own practice space in Vancouver, the material on MYTHS evolved slowly but surely. "Things changed a lot, it was a huge process" Hall says. "Re-recording things, going over things and having intros and outros, it really became a piece that went together and actually has a somewhat abstracted narrative form. It definitely came together as a full idea by the end of it. But it was a very long process."

The music on MYTHS maintains the dark, at times off-putting synth pop that has characterized the duo from the beginning. By their own admission, though, the duo are still making positive music.

"It is dark, but it's kind of empowering at the same time," Rodgers explains. "It deals with darker themes and we definitely have dark inspirations, but the idea is kind of to look at them and try to figure out how you can overcome those things and be empowered... I think sometimes to sort of be in a really empowered, positive space you need to be able to deal with the darkness that exists."

Now, the duo have been testing the waters on tour, including a recent stint at the Ottawa Bluesfest. While they avoided the natural disasters, they felt a little out of place on the outdoor stage. "When somebody asked us to do it, everyone was like, 'Why are you doing a blues festival?' And we thought, 'I dunno, we're obviously not blues music,'" Rodgers recalls. "And it's true, they do have all kinds of other music, like Soundgarden was playing and Neon Indian, but actually there was a blues band before us and a blues band directly after us. It was really awkward."

But MYTHS still have a handful of shows lined up, including an album release show in Vancouver on August 6. You can see the dates below, and the record will officially be out August 6 digitally and as a limited CD, with a vinyl release tentatively planned for the future. You can get the record directly from the band on their upcoming dates and it will also be available on iTunes. - Exclaim!

In a time when music is largely shared over the Internet, and YouTube views are seen as a measure of success, it’s rare to find a band that hasn’t been caught in the fast-paced competition of the World Wide Web. The pressure to reach as many people as possible has created a bloated database of quantity over quality that can sometimes be overwhelming and difficult to digest.

Vancouver duo Myths is part of the mysterious minority of the modern music age: a search attempt will fail to shed much light on the electro noise dance duo, made up of Quinne Rodgers and Lief Hall. With only one “mini-CD” of early incarnations of songs available to date and little Internet exposure, Myths have created their reputation from live performances and word of mouth within the scene. They have been careful not to flood the Internet with rough cuts, demos and video clips – a seemingly strategic way to retain their dark intrigue, but also a method to maintain control over their art until the time is right. With the release of a self-titled full-length album in July, an East Coast tour and the promise of a band website, Hall is relieved they’re finally able to be exposed on a deeper level without compromising the quality of their work. “We’re both very particular people with very particular ideas about how we want things to be. We come together on so many points, but we also push each other a lot,” she says. “We have to agree on everything, so it takes a lot longer. We’re interested in having more out in the world. This is finally the first step.”

The album will also finally give fans the chance to experience Myths in a setting outside their live shows, which create an extreme experience with visuals, theatrics, motion and noise. The spontaneous freedom and shared energy in a live setting has left audiences with their own memory of that moment-in-time, but a permanent textbook of material will finally give fans the chance to really sink their teeth into the songs and reach a deeper level of understanding.

The band was formed partly through a mutual interest in sociology, fantasy and mythology, and the idea of turning convention in society into one’s own reality. The ability to dissect their songs on a more personal and intimate level will allow listeners to find these messages, while the use of fantasy themes and abstract techniques will open the doors to interpretation through stimulation. Although the prospect of such vulnerability could create some anxiety, Myths believe they’ve only set the stage to the best of their abilities and with the truest of intentions – it’s now up to the listener to absorb from and react to the material to the extent they desire.

“It’s a delicate balance,” says Rodgers. “I think with art, it’s important to be able to project yourself into it, to see yourself in it.” Hall hopes to finally have their message clearly recognized, while allowing the listener to put together the sum of the parts and find the bigger picture. “You have this jacket, this naked object. It’s like you see the jacket and you take a microscope and you can see all the textures and the colours and it’s just so much richer than just a jacket. It’s not so much about being vulnerable as it is experiencing more. The landscape of your mind is so much richer.” - Beatroute

Talk about terrifying, but in the most obscenely beautiful of ways. On the self-titled debut disc from Myths, conspirators Lief Hall and Quinne Rodgers come on as modern-day heirs to Vancouver industrial icons Skinny Puppy. Yes, this seven-song exercise in microchip-powered madness is that mesmerizing, the band displaying a seemingly unending appetite for subterranean synth violence, cancer-black percussion, and hyper-distorted, feral howling that sounds like it’s coming from that thing that lives under the cellar stairs.

Even though “The Horizon” kicks things off on an almost ethereal note, with angelic gang-chant vocals layered over a buzz-bombed bass line, things go south two minutes in, right around the time the wraithlike gibbering starts. “Deadlights” gives you a good idea what the goth clubs of Mordor sound like on ’80s-horror-film night, and the only thing missing from the relentlessly clattering, synth-soaked no-waver “The Labyrinth” is that Poltergeist kid announcing, “They’re heeeere”. It all adds up to a creepily cacophonic but richly textured record made for that time of year when the leaves start dying on the trees, the sun is nonexistent after 4 p.m., and you can’t see the streetlights for the fog.

Which is another way of saying that if you’re looking for a guaranteed way to freak yourself out, grab a pair of headphones, hop the fence of Mountain View Cemetery, crank up the white-noise nightmare that is “Esprit de Corps”, and then prepare to be afraid. Very, very afraid. Congratulations, Myths, you’ve just produced a dark-hearted work of art so accomplished, it’s fucking scary. - The Georgia Straight

There were a handful of agreed-upon “must sees” who drew the wallflowers out of their tents over the two days that I attended – Vancouver digi-punk banshees MYTHS on the Saturday, for instance….

Then MYTHS stormed onstage and shot a bolt of assaultive, Goth-industrial terror down the meadow. Fancifully costumed principles Lief Hall and Quinne Rodgers spewed bestial mutant-rap rants and processed shrieks over hammering-hard rhythm tracks worthy of Atari Teenage Riot with a self-assured, rock-stardom-worthy vigour that buried everyone around them; they were easily the highlight of the weekend.
- Toronto.com

Standing as one of Vancouver’s most promising new bands out there, Myths are gearing up for their opening slot for HEALTH with this sure-to-be-great Pat’s Pub throw-down. Seriously, if you spent last year repeatedly playing that Fever Ray record, Salem and whatever other dark as fuck electro jams you could find, you owe it to yourself to check this one out. - Exclaim!

Following MYTHS' stunning performance the other month at Pat's Pub, opening for an equally experimental band gave the duo the benefit of a more receptive audience. These concertgoers were already expecting some degree of sonic assault, and MYTHS' dark, squalling electro/noise turned a few heads. - Exclaim!

Few bands assault the sense like MYTHS. Combining out-there noise, synth-led electro and ear-grabbing pop, the Vancouver, BC duo are on a wavelength all their own, as their pop-noir approach flirts with post-industrialism, witch house and Knife-influenced weird dance, yet remains its own art-damaged beast. Unfortunately, until now, MYTHS have remained strictly a Vancouver phenomena — something the pair are hoping to change this summer with a lengthy North American tour and, eventually, a debut full-length.

Kicking off with appearances at Washington’s Squeak and Squawk Festival and Calgary’s Sled Island, where MYTHS will play alongside Woodhands, Cex and !!!, the duo of Lief Hall and Quinne Rodgers will make the rounds in the U.S., hitting up L.A., New York, Austin and a whole lot in between. Along the way, MYTHS will head back up to Canada for shows in Montreal and Toronto, as well as at Ontario’s Electric Eclectics Festival, which Hall tells Exclaim! was “the major motivator of the tour.”

“We figured if we are going to go to Ontario, might as well go the funnest way possible — even though its the longest route there,” she jokes in a recent interview.

In addition to the group’s visually and aurally explosive live show (see a review of one here), the band will be showing off selections from their as-yet-untitled debut album. As Hall, who once shrieked for Vancouver’s dearly departed Mutators, reveals, the record is being recorded at hometown studio Little Red Sounds with Cosmetics’ Felix Fung, who took over recording the album after Fine Mist’s Jay Arner was forced to pull out of the sessions.

“We are doing all the mixing ourselves, which has been taking a while, but we are learning a lot, and listening a lot and just letting the mixing itself become part of the creative process,” Hall says. “It has actually been really good for us to go through this process because we have new ideas all the time with how we can mix things and then when we try to recreate that in our live show we find all kinds of other new neat things to work with — so we are constantly learning and evolving through this process — although it’s kind of hilarious how much energy ends up going into each song. Each song has become a precious gem that we continue to buffer and polish, but it’s nice to see the shine emerge.”

In the meantime, you can look out for MYTHS’ self-titled mini CD, which the band will be hawking at the merch table during the summer live dates. Along with the stand-out “Deadlights” and its vocal gymnastics, the four-track demo features “Goldbase,” “The Wedding March” and free-form electro-noise piece “//\\ <<|>>//\\.” You can currently hear “Deadlights” and “Goldbase” on the band’s MySpace page.

“Of course those versions of the songs are also different from the album versions, but the noise piece is all its own,” Hall says of the self-release. “We want to start incorporating more improvised noise stuff into our live set as well, which we have begun to do at the last couple shows. It’s a really great way to make each show totally unique — and fun too — so we can play around and see what happens and work with it.”

No firm dates has been slated for MYTHS' full-length, but it will be released via Vancouver’s Nominal Records sometime this fall.
- Exclaim!

Myths burrowed deep into my animal brain, cooing sexy death chants over slithering electro-clash. They are one of the more exciting new bands I’ve seen in Vancouver. - Digging for Grins in the Tooth-Pile

MYTHS is the latest project from Lief Hall of the gone, but definitely not forgotten, Mutators, and the buzz surrounding them is palpable. Mutators were arguably the harshest, loudest and best of Vancouver's noise punk scene, and their departure left a definite void to be filled. But MYTHS take things in a completely different direction.

After a lengthy set-up, MYTHS finally unleashed their much-anticipated attack upon the unsuspecting audience, and to say that it was polarizing would be a serious understatement — several audience members immediately rushed for the exits. But those smart enough to stick around witnessed something entirely original, with a performance that straddled dark electro and straight-up performance art, terrorizing the audience in way reminiscent of Mutators but from MYTHS' new warped pop angle.

Hall and band-mate Quinne Rodgers used their voices like percussion instruments, alternating between semi-conventional singing and bestial shrieks, letting crackling pre-programmed beats provide the backing track. It was hard to listen to at times, but challenging in the way that art should be, and few could deny MYTHS are onto something that's distinctly their own.
- Exclaim!

Despite a delayed start to the evening’s festivities, the room was still sparsely populated when Myths took the stage to kick things off. The lack of an audience didn’t weigh on the duo of Quinne Rodgers and former Mutators singer screamer Leif Hall who politely thanked those already in attendance “for showing up early,” before launching into their set. Performing sans backing band, the pair sang, screamed and, thanks to some nifty effects, stretched and distorted their vocals over backing tracks that featured industrial drums and dark, grinding synths. Good on you, if you showed up early enough to catch them. - Discorder