Sun Against Artemis: Giving Voice to an Inexpressible Duality

by Charles McGuigan 08.2022

Photos by Rebecca D’Angelo

Here’s the lineup: vocalist June Kambourian, with Nick Erickson on lead guitar, Cason Duszak on drums, Raegan Harrhy on keys and guitar, and Cole Wise on bass. And each member of this Richmond band is a powerhouse in his or her own right. On a blistering July afternoon, we are gathered around a table in a house in Bellevue. Only Raegan Harrhy is missing from the group; he’s up in Maine at the time of this interview, but he will send me a little bit about himself later in the week. Each one of them is stoked about the upcoming release of their EP which features five of their original songs. And they are deferential to one another—admiringly so—quick to point out the team effort behind the production of each song they create. They all seem to understand that the whole is only equal to the sum of the parts; egos don’t rear their hideous heads here.

Side note: There must be something in the Kambourian genetic code that lends itself to musical composition and performance. June Kambourian and Nick Erickson are cousins who grew up on the same street less than two blocks away from one another. I have known both of these young Northsiders from the time they were still in single digits. One evening, in the home of Nick’s mother and her partner, I watched and listened as Nick played his electric guitar. He was just thirteen years old at the time, yet he had a command of the instrument I had rarely seen in professionals three times his age. Nick made the guitar sing like it was B.B. King.  And the first time I heard June sing, when she was under sixteen, I was blown away; her voice will stop you dead in your tracks. Even then she had the range and emotive quality of Frances, the UK singer-songwriter. 

One thing all members of Sun Against Artemis have in common: from a very early age they attended School of Rock. So that is where we begin.

Remembering the years he spent at School of Rock, Nick says, “It honestly helped me in the way of playing because they force you to learn other people’s music, and learning songs in their entirety helps you progress the most on your instrument. It’s much better than just running scales.”

Cason began taking classes at School of Rock when he was just nine years old. “I was seven or eight when I first started drumming,” he says. “I had ADHD bad growing up, but I found that drumming really helped with it and it kept it under control. School of Rock helped me focus even more on drumming.”

But June has a slightly different take on School of Rock. “It was all covers and they didn’t really like it when you would do somebody’s cover in your own way,” she says. “They wanted it to sound like the track pretty much. They were weird about that.” And there seemed to be a lack of prominent female vocalists for students to emulate. “It was all man songs, songs sung by men,” June remembers. “I very rarely had songs sung by a female vocalist. There was only one I can think of and it was Misery Business by Paramore which is the most cliché female vocal song there is.” 

June does say that School of Rock did prepare her for the stage. “We were in a house band and we got little band gigs,” she says. “They were at events that partnered with School of Rock. Live venues. We played at the Canal Club, Capitol Ale House, Watermelon Festival, a few breweries.”

And for Raegan, as he would explain in an email, School of Rock was a game changer. “I never really had the chance to play with other people apart from school band class until I started at School of Rock,” she would write. “It was a great opportunity to gain stage experience and meet other young musicians, and I’m so grateful that I had the chance to learn so much, and meet some of my best friends.”

Like the other members of the band, Cole began learning guitar at an early age.  After taking acoustic guitar lessons for two years in his home, he began at School of Rock.  “I started there when I was eleven,” he says. “It really kicked off from there.”

We begin talking about influences. “A lot of my technique comes from a classic rock background,” says Cole. “Lately though, I’m getting involved with more modern techniques. Jacob Umansky has a crazy technique that I’ve been studying for a long time, and there’s also Adam Nolly from Periphery.”

Raegan will later tell me that his influences span the entire spectrum of music. “There are a lot of artists from many different genres that have influenced me as a musician,” he will say. “Close to our genre of music, I’m a big fan of Zachary Garren and Aaron Marshall, but I’m personally inspired by the storytelling and musicality of artists I grew up listening to like Leonard Cohen, Elton John, and Billy Joel, especially as a piano player. My biggest musical influence, however, has always been my older brother, Camden, as a guitar player and musician in general. I started playing music because of him.”

Nick remembers different influences at different stages of his musical development. “I listened to a lot classic blues guitarists, but I was never super into it,” he says. “I was into the shreddy stuff. I think honestly I had a good ear for picking out rudimentary stuff done within blues and I could kind of mimic it, but phrasing-wise it was never super pristine until later. I was trying to mimic what I heard in songs that sounded good just kind of by ear.”

Cason talks about how he gradually filled his tool belt over the years, learning techniques from a variety of drummers. “I’ve rotated through so many different phases and different bands that it’s really hard to pinpoint just one person who influenced me,” he tells me. “I take inspiration from so many different people. But one drummer I’ve always admired is Neil Peart who passed six or seven months ago. He was just incredible for the entire world of drumming. Just completely new unheard of progressive things that he added.”

It takes June exactly one second to name the fellow vocalist who first caught her attention. “The first person I was ever inspired by was Adele,” she says. “My old nanny brought me her 21 CD. That was an eye-opening moment for me. And I’m really into Ella Fitzgerald. And then there’s Lucy Dacus. Oh my God! I just saw her. We took a train all the way to New York just to see her the other day. When I hear her I notice that her technique is very similar to a lot of jazz singers that I like.”

While June, Cason, Cole, and Raegan were still attending School of Rock, they created a band called Andromeda. Then in 2019, these four founding members of that band dissolved it, and out of its ashes there rose Sun Against Artemis, with Nick joining them as lead guitartist. Almost instantly they began doing gigs all over town from The Camel to The Canal Club.

Sun Against Artemis’s style is decidedly post-hardcore, an offshoot of punk rock that embraces the aggressive intensity of the original form, while emphasizing greater artistic expression. It all began back in the 1980s with bands like Husker Du and Minutemen. Even the dance form associated with this genre—moshing—is derivative of the punk era’s slam dancing.

Nick talks about the process the band employs when writing a new piece of music. It is definitely a collaborative effort. “The way I approach the writing is this,” Nick says. “I have my guitar parts in my head for a whole song, and then I record them and then I program some basic drum part to go behind it that gives structure to the song.” But that is just the beginning.

“That’s when I send the ideas to Cole and Cason and June and Raegan,” Nick continues. “Cason would take the drum part and he would change it around. Cole adds his bass parts in. We did that for every song on the EP. The songs come from this little image I had, and everyone else evolves it and gives it personality.”

Cason nods, and says, “Not to let Nick downplay his writing. He puts some fire down on the tracks for drums. It’s just the extra nuances I add.  It’s still great stuff that he puts down originally on the demos.”

And then June says, “For this EP, Nick wrote most of the lyrics. Nick will actually track some demo vocals, and then I’ll listen to it, and then we either track exactly what that is or we talk about what we would want to change and how we would want to do it and then it gets recorded.”

June recalls recently speaking with Cole about another Richmond band they had just heard.   “I was like, ‘All of these parts individually are really good, but they don’t blend together,’” she says. “And I was saying that it was really helpful that Nick works a lot on the vocal melodies, and just doesn’t throw me into it, and because he’s writing the instrumental he can also mesh them together really well, and I think it sounds very cohesive.”

Just a few days before the interview, Nick and his band members were talking with their producer, a man named Mikey.  “We were going through the lore of the EP,” Nick explains. “We went back and forth and pinpointed a bunch of exact themes. The lyrics though are intentionally ambiguous enough to mean whatever you want them to mean. But each song pertains to the mind in a certain way.”

For instance, one track is about twisted and demented minds that do terrible things. “Another song is about your mind blasting you with oppressive dreams,” says Nick. “One is about the manifestation of negative energy and how negative scenarios will arise. But if you can harness the power of the mind you can make some good stuff happen.”

The final song is utterly ambiguous.  “How does your mind interpret this last song?” Nick asks, rhetorically. “The lyrics are very open-ended and have no general meaning.”

June remembers remembers the making of that song, and her response to it. “Nick and I worked on that one together and it was a long span of time before the lyrics were finished,” June says. “And when I heard it I was like, ‘Oh my God this is heartbreaking.  Are you okay, Nick? This is some deep stuff you’re saying.’”

And Nick’s response, according to his cousin: “I’m fine. Honestly, it just kind of sounded cool.”

Soon enough, with the release of the EP, you’ll be able to hear the lyrics for yourself.

“It will be available everywhere,” says June. 

Nick immediately chimes in, “TITLE, Amazon Music Prime, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube. Everywhere.”

And their release party will be held at the venue that is almost like a second home to the band—The Canal Club.