Through Infinity and Beyond
BEN WEINMAN DISCUSSES THE UNEXPECTED RETURN OF THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN AND THE MAKING OF THEIR LANDMARK DEBUT ALBUM, 1999’S CALCULATING INFINITY
BEN WEINMAN HADN’T planned on playing Dillinger Escape Plan songs in 2024. Back in 2017, the New Jersey guitarist thought he’d concluded the chaotic fusion extremists’ 20-year run at the top of their game, specifically while stomping out the irregular-shifting mosh of “43% Burnt,” perhaps the band’s most iconic bit of brutality. Since then, Weinman has happily spent time scoring film projects and thrashing rhythms with crossover mainstays Suicidal Tendencies. That all changes this June when Dillinger celebrate the silver anniversary of their manically experimental debut album, 1999’s Calculating Infinity, with a rare trio of headlining dates in New York and a warmup set at Pomona, California’s No Values festival. Though the outfit’s meter-defying return is highly anticipated, Weinman had reservations about reviving the Plan.
“I had no intentions of breaking up with the thought of doing it again later as a reunion,” the guitarist says of Dillinger’s initial implosion. “As far as I was concerned, when I walked offstage at the end of 2017, I felt completely satisfied.”
What changed his mind was an opportunity to step onstage with the band’s original all-rage howler, Dimitri Minakakis — a high school friend who departed Dillinger in 2001. A recent run of similarly nostalgic shows supporting Suicidal Tendencies’ 1983 self-titled debut also opened Weinman’s eyes to bringing Calculating Infinity to a new generation of music fans. “As a fan of Suicidal, it’s cool to be playing the songs that were the start of everything and are still very relevant — like ‘Institutionalized.’ And seeing the kids of the original fans going off at these shows was really inspiring.”
The roots of the Dillinger Escape Plan, meanwhile, lay in a straight-forward Nineties hardcore band called Arcane, whom the competitive Weinman admits weren’t pushing the needle in their local basement circuit. Citing a need to “put the pedal to the metal,” the new plan was to obnoxiously smash drummer Chris Pennie’s progressive concussive-ness against the youthful rage bubbling within Weinman. “I was angry. I wanted to vent everything [into the music]. So, he was pushing me on a technical side, and I was pushing him on a more visceral side,” Weinman says.
While Dillinger Escape Plan’s self-titled debut EP remained reasonably linear, 1998 breakthrough EP Under the Running Board — their first release for Relapse Records — dumped death metal, Seventies jazz fusion, Afro-Cuban rhythms and the complex electronic sculpting of Aphex Twin “into a blender to make something completely new.” The next year’s Calculating Infinity was a wide-scale sensory overload, where pieces like “Destro’s Secret” peppered clean-channel jazz-bop around the otherwise panicked polyrhythmia of Weinman’s atonal, diminished dyad stacking. “We weren’t interested in someone being able to tap their foot to it,” Weinman says of Dillinger’s most quizzical frameworks. He’ll confess that he wasn’t quite sure how to play most of it live, either.
“I wasn’t playing accurately in the beginning; I was just going crazy,” he says with a laugh. “As people became fans of the band, though, I realized, ‘Oh shit… they really want to hear what I recorded!’ It became a balance of visceral expression and actually trying to play. It also became kind of an unsaid requirement of whomever our second guitarist was: Help lock this down, because Ben’s falling all over the place. It was important that we glued it all together, [rather than be] some kind of WWE wrestling show.”
Dillinger Escape Plan were an intimidating live force — Weinman’s hazardous, Jackson-swinging stage presence led to numerous self-induced head wounds, a rotator cuff injury and a skull fracture, among other maladies — but they also juxtaposed that reckless energy against gleefully madcap musical references to 19th-century composer Julius Fučík. “A misconception people had about us was that we were super-serious, elitist, snobby art jerks that put our nose up at typical punk and metal bands, but most of the bands we ended up touring with saw that we were clowns,” he says in relation to quoting the big top fanfare of “Entry of the Gladiators’’ — the quintessential circus music cue — in Calculating Infinity’s tapderanged “Sugar Coated Sour.”
Despite being the songwriter, Weinman maintains he wasn’t much of a technical player at first. Running Board co-guitarist John Fulton, however, was a practice-obsessed musician who could handle any obtuse scale blitz Weinman threw his way, at least until Fulton quit the band to study computer science. Weinman also fondly recalls how founding bassist Adam Doll was just as dialed into the mania, from a performance perspective — sadly, a car accident left the rhythm stringer paralyzed from the chest down just before the group hit the studio to cut Calculating Infinity.
“The band had hoped that he would eventually recover to the point where he could play with us again, but we knew it wasn’t going to be any time soon,” Weinman says of the tragedy. “We didn’t want
this thing to fall apart, so we had to go forward so that there was something for Adam to come back to. I was extremely freaked out, because I did not have the confidence that I could create this album without these guys’ help. The level of playing on Calculating was an overcompensation for that, for sure — the nervousness of not fulfilling my own expectations. It was fueled by anxiety.”
Despite this, producer Steve Evetts managed to whip Weinman into shape while obsessively multi-tracking guitars and bass straight-to-tape at South River, New Jersey’s Trax East studio [“No ProTools… no cutting and pasting”]. While the guitarist’s dexterous skills improved significantly, an anxious feeling remained in the music. Take the hyper-speed blast sections of
“I broke rules intentionally, and I made it part of our vocabulary”
Calculating classics “43% Burnt” and “Jim Fear,” where Weinman confoundingly complements frenetic phrases with a seconded-layer just a semi-tone up.
“I broke rules intentionally, and I made it part of our vocabulary,” he says of the aesthetic. “It sounds out of tune, essentially, but almost every lead run on the record was doubled with a half-step harmony; that continued through the career of the band. It sounded circus-y. Quirky. Uncomfortable. That, along with dissonant jazz scales or diminished whole tones, became a major ingredient of our sound.”
Weinman remembers keeping things relatively low-gain to highlight the percussive complexity of his riffs, blending an Ampeg VH-140C with an “uber-clean” DI. He might’ve played a Jackson with EMGs at some point, but he notes that the record’s spanky-sounding cleans were played on a piezo-loaded Parker Fly — and he hasn’t seen one since. What was most important to Weinman was harnessing his stage-rage in a studio setting. “Steve Evetts always said tone was in your hands, [and]
I beat the shit out of my guitars. I picked very aggressively. Broke many strings. That contributed to the sound of the album.”
Though Weinman handled most of Calculating Infinity, guitarist Brian Benoit joined the act mid-way through the making of the album. They’d met in 1998 when Dillinger were on tour with Benoit’s previous band, Jesuit. While that Virginia Beach quartet were steeped in a sludge-heavy sound, Weinman learned that Benoit had chops to spare; that tour he offered to join the band, should their situation ever change. The next year he moved to New Jersey and wrote a pivotal breakdown on “Variations on a Cocktail Dress.” He was fully ingrained in the lineup by 2002’s Irony Is a Dead Scene EP.
The full Calculating-era lineup won’t be reuniting in New York; Benoit retired from full-time musicianship in 2004 after suffering severe nerve damage in his hands and neck; Pennie hasn’t played with them since 2007. Weinman and Minakakis will be joined by mid-’00s guitarist James Love, bassist Liam Wilson and drummer Billy Rymer. Dillinger Escape Plan’s founding riffer, however, is grateful to get the chance to revisit the period and reflect on the formative chaos of the early days.
“We were siphoning gas to get from show to show. We were playing coffee shops and getting in trouble because Dimitri would get up on the counter and knock over coffee machines, pissing off patrons… All that stuff was so memorable and so important.”
So far, Dillinger’s return is a limitedtime thing. Weinman’s main gig remains with Suicidal Tendencies, who he’d joined in 2018. Plans are in flux, but they’re entertaining the idea of writing their first album of originals since 2016’s World Gone Mad. Considering the multiple legacies he’s honoring, Weinman laughs when asked whether he ever drops Dillinger-style half-step harmonies into sacred Suicidal thrashers like “Institutionalized.”
“Dean Pleasants is the lead guitar player and has been for a very long time, but I do have opportunities to do ad-libs,” he says. “Suicidal encourages free expression and improv. That’s what’s cool, the different kinds of players — like gospel drummers, or bass players that aren’t typically from the metal world. It’s never frowned upon to throw your own flavors in.”