Like rays of light breaking through millennia of frozen tundra, the short-lived post-rock outfit, Buffalo’s own Tomoreaux, summoned spirits both pure and evil,  stitching them together in tornadic strides with threads pulled from the very fabric of reality. A slow burning warehouse fire, a gathering hurricane, Jovian planets colliding, at volumes unfit for human ears, audiences awash in blankets of sound, with the occasional aural shards of glass thrown at the face.

In 2015, Jesse James Kaufman and Kay Stuitje dropped out of college to pursue this dream of pummeling basements and bars alike with this molten orb of sound, playing with a variety of drummers along the way.

In the fall of 2015 with drummer Preston Cofta and then-second guitarist Joshua Keller, Tomoreaux receded to a former Methodist church in the woods of Geneseo, NY to record what would eventually be titled “At Peace, Overlook,” a beautiful and raucous journey spanning 8 songs, all meditations on and about a hill near Bennington, NY. Recorded with Stephen Roessner and Mike Brown at Temperamental Studios, “At Peace, Overlook” was released on January 16, 2016 to a nearly sold-out crowd at Buffalo’s Mohawk Place. This band, previously unknown by the Buffalo music scene, mysteriously squirmed itself in, leaving worms to writhe in listeners’ ears for months. This show would kick off the band’s first tour; however, Cofta quit just weeks before the tour would begin. Tomoreaux scrambled and was able to manage playing with a handful of different drummers, making it as far north as Montreal and as far east as NYC and Philadelphia.

Shortly after this tour Little Baltimore was birthed, a house venue run by Stuitje and Kaufman like no other, with, according to The Daily Public, an “allure of a secret society.” A real Wonderland sort of upside down place, the venue hosted many shows in its short existence, and the few that Tomoreaux played shook the entire West Side. It was in this environment that new songs began to proliferate, festering in the dark, dirty corners of the house’s structure and the band members’ minds. Nathan Zak joined on drums somewhere during this period.

New songs began to take form, although the sheer innocence and transcendental reverence of the first record had been lost, symbolic of heavy times that weighed on the lives of Stuitje and Kaufman. Fires burned inside skulls and thrust through stacks of amps. Experiments with altered states led to subconscious nightmare wanderings cataloged by these new songs. Live performances became exorcisms, the great purge and catharsis of songs like “Paradigm” brought audiences to real tears. Between the volume, the emotion, and the magick behind the songs, often even close friends would need to leave the venue mid-set; the rest stood hypnotized, leaving the venue in a less-than-physical sense.
These types of shows weigh heavily on a person’s psyche, something that shouldn’t be done too often, but Tomoreaux pressed on into the Inferno, cruising with grace and speed like the Reaper’s Corvette. Kaufman and Stuitje knew this tumbling locomotive would implode soon. And it did.

On June 3rd, 2017, Tomoreaux packed its cult into a sweaty East Side basement, summoning every trauma and every demon in its arsenal. When the spirit took over, instruments were broken, all-out noise had erupted, and the mountain exploded. By the end, everyone present knew this was the last time they would see  the band.

“Hum,” the diary-like charting of this time, was released six months after the band had split, on December 17, 2017, Saturnalia. There was no label release, and there was no tour, only the echoes of souls molten and quickly evaporating. What’s left is a musical map of Hell.

TOMOREAUX is following

TOMOREAUX is not following anyone.