Moiscus Interview Part II: Reegan

After the completion of Moiscus’s “Easy Rider” tour across the Southern US, I decided to get a deeper understanding of the band by interviewing their incredibly talented drummer, Reegan. Moiscus’s man on the cans has had a long history of playing metal music, which first started when he was in sixth grade playing with Adam Witmer and Steven Orban, who he would later reunite with on Moiscus’s first album, THE CRYSTAL EVOCATION OF THE CHAINS OF DISRUPTION. After that early middle school band, Reegan’s coming of age as a metal drummer came after he met the legendary Dayton guitarist, Nash Walkup. Together, they would form the band Flesh Warfare.

At first, Reegan and Nash covered songs from Metallica and Slayer and mostly performed at The Avenue, which is well known to any Miami county youth as one of the strangest ways a mega-church has ever tried to appeal to teens. (“The Avenue” was a substance-free recreation spot that catered to 7th- 10th graders which was ran by the massive Ginghamsburg Church)

After a short break, they decided to start writing original songs with the help of Stefen Moore. All of 2010, they began to write the first songs for Flesh Warfare along with covering songs by Death. Flesh Warfare would be Reegan’s only band for a few years, as they transitioned from thrashy death metal into their more recent black metal sound.

Reegan told me that around 2015, he was introduced to grindcore by his Putrid Liquid bandmate, bassist Jesse Creekbaum “I had heard of grindcore before, but never really paid attention to it. He sent me a link to this band called Agathocles, who is really classic mincecore and one of the pioneers of any grindcore sound. I was like, okay, grindcore is cool. But it was kinda hard for me to get into at first because it was so extreme, and I wasn’t used to that extreme of a style. But I was so fascinated by how fast the drums were and shit, because I always loved black metal . . . I was like damn, these drums are so fast. I love this. Then, I was into grindcore.”

It came as no surprise to me that Jesse would be the one to introduce Reegan to a genre like grindcore. Jesse is an extreme person in every way he acts. He is well known for performing feats of fowl performance art at shows around the Dayton metal scene. From taking sips of Jägermeister out of his bandmate’s dreadlocks, to his most notorious stunt: drinking beer straight from the depths of an old dirty toilet plunger.

“I found goregrind, and the drums are even more crazy and everything is more brutal. Its kinda like grindcore meets death metal. Right now, though, my favorite of all these genre’s has to be brutal death metal just because of all the different things you can do with it. You can just make it sound more diverse, where goregrind and grindcore can kinda get boring after a while.”

When I asked Reegan what its been like playing with Nash Walkup in Flesh Warfare as they have gotten older and more mature he told me, “It’s honestly hard for me to imagine that he is better at guitar than I am at drums. Whenever he sends me shit to listen to now, I just go ‘How did you do this!?’. It’s literally like listening to Mozart or something. He records multiple guitar tracks on top of one another, and it always makes me go ‘WTF, this is nuts.”

I asked Reegan what it’s been like playing with Moiscus compared to his earlier projects. He told me, “It’s really cool . . . It’s totally different. It’s weird, when we were writing stuff for the last two Moiscus releases, everything just kinda flowed super naturally. Adam really caught onto the writing process for this type of music really quickly. I’ve been playing in Putrid Liquid since 2016, so I’ve written gorerind and really fast stuff. And just recently more death metal style. But Adam really caught onto this SO quickly when we first started writing. I think it’s because he’s delved into it and listens to these underground bands like Demolich and stuff.”

I asked Reegan if the metal scene is different since playing with Moiscus compared to Flesh Warfare and Putrid Liquid. He told me, “Ya, it really is. There’s been a lot of personal things that have happened, some of which didn’t involve us, some of which did involve us. There’s been drama, so there’s people that were involved in the scene that aren’t involved anymore. We still play music and we’re never gonna stop playing music because of this shit. Now, it seems things have really shifted to where things really revolve around only a few bands that we play with. It’s not the same people it was five, ten years ago. It has really warped and transformed. Scenes are always evolving.”

Moiscus was formed amidst the early days of COVID lockdowns when people across the world were forced to stay far from the lens of public view. I suspected that the newly found free time and isolation had an influence on the formation of the band and asked Reegan if that was true. “Pretty much completely. It was like 50% us wanting to make a band and 50% us just wanting shit to do. We just didn’t stop. I was SO motivated during that time. I heard so many people who said ‘I was just trapped and didn’t know what to do.’ While, that was the most motivating time in my life! I was barely working while we wrote the first EP me and Adam made together. I was doing under the table tree work. I had my own schedule, so there were times we could practice whenever the fuck we wanted. That’s how we were able to bust out all of these songs. Sometimes we would write a couple in one day. We would send back to each other like three songs to remember next jam session. Then we would tweak them, change them, but yeah. It went really fast.”

I wanted to know why Moiscus’s last tour was called the “Easy Rider Tour”.  Reegan told me “I didn’t even come up with that. I think Adam was just like ‘It’s the Easy Rider Tour.’ He had just got that new Volkswagen SUV and it really was an Easy Rider. It was a brand new car and we barely had any problems. Well, besides our window getting broken out in San Antonio. It was one of those things. We left the show to go to this person’s house to stay the night. We we’re hanging out until pretty late and the whole time we asked the guy, ‘should we move the car?’ He said it was about 80% safe. We were like ‘What’s the other 20%, dude? All of our gear and our whole life is in there. 20% is pretty large.’ Adam even asked me if we should move the car, and I told him ‘Nahh, there’s only like four or five more hours where anything might happen.’ So we walk outside to go check it out. Oh, nice. The driver window is busted. No shit. We opened the door, and everything was as it was. Nothing was moved. Either a little shithead kid busted it out because it was Halloween weekend, or someone was nearby. Who knows. But yeah, busted window and nothing missing. All that happened was Adam had to pay a $100 deductible and we had to keep the car at a storage place until the window was fixed. But, other than that. Easy Rider tour for sure.

I asked Reegan to share his favorite stories from the tour. “We got to see the countryside and eat a lot of random food. We went to Nashville and went to a crazy Nashville chicken. I just got a normal whatever dry seasoned chicken. Adam and Joey (Gross Load)  both got this Nashville hot-as-shit chicken sandwich. The waitress warned them, and I realize they are both suffering as they start eating it. I ended up trying just a piece of Joey’s and it fucked my shit up. I was like ‘Dude, how are you gonna eat that whole thing?’ and Joey had to tap out. And that was right before the show. Joey was like ‘That fucked me up! I’ve never eaten anything that hot in my life.’ And he was dying while trying to perform with that in his stomach.”

Reegan told me his favorite city to play in on the tour was New Orleans. They performed alongside Dai Kaiju, who put on an epic set where they lit the cymbals of their drumset on fire as they performed. They also got to play in the French Quarter. With the show stretching until 3 A.M. they stayed awake until sunrise both nights they were in “The Bayou”, as they called it. Reegan told me, “Someone asked us if we wanted to go to a rave our first night there, and it was like 4 A.M. We told him, ‘Noo, we’re just trying to get stoned and chill probably’ not to mention we had to get driven everywhere by someone else because the window was still busted. Also, I was dressed as a sexy tiger and it was Halloween weekend. That town is just pure anarchy and craziness.”

As the interview ended, I was grateful to have Reegan as a friend. Hearing him tell these stories only shows the tip of the iceberg that is the brutal insanity of Moiscus. Reegan told me that every city they perfomed in, people loved them even if they weren’t into that type of music. Something about Moiscus’s blend of gonzo comedy and brutal musical talent is able to appeal to a wider audience than most underground metal bands. After 21 days of touring with only 2 days off, Reegan looked exhausted but satisfied about what he and Adam had accomplished. I thanked Reegan for taking his time to let me interview him, and we both looked forward to the next time we could meet and share stories again.

The photo of the two of us standing by the Troy levy was taken moments after our interview by another drummer, my friend Jaden Fisher. I realized the three of us all expressed ourselves in more ways than just music. Reegan is a talented illustrator, Jaden a photographer, and I am a writer. More than anything though, it is our shared love of music that brings us together. At the end of the day, we were proud of the comradery we all shared as fellow musicians and artists in a small town like Troy, Ohio.

Black and White photos courtesy of Jaden Fisher

Color photos from Instagram