Blind Idiot God is an instrumental rock trio formed in the mid 1980s in St. Louis, Missouri by guitarist Andy Hawkins, bassist Gabe Katz and drummer Ted Epstein. They socialized with the St. Louis hardcore punk scene, including members of Drunks with Guns and Ultraman. After hearing their self-produced cassette demo, Greg Ginn of Black Flag, signed them to SST Records, and the band moved to Brooklyn. In 2006, Blind Idiot God reunited after roughly a decade of inactivity, with Tim Wyskida (of Khanate) replacing Epstein.
Though at its core heavy metal, Blind Idiot God's music was informed by punk rock, dub reggae, and classical music composers, notably György Ligeti and Igor Stravinsky. In a 1997 Guitar Player interview, Hawkins explained one reason he drew inspiration from classical music: "When I listen to a lot of metal and hard rock, I think 'Great Intensity! Boring chords!'"
Critical opinion of the band was mostly positive: Brian Olewnick described their self-titled debut album as "an extraordinary debut the three musicians exhibited startling originality and impressive technique both on their instruments and in the depth and style of their compositions"; while Piero Scaruff writes, "The ugly geometry of its mini-rock symphonies had few precedents in popular music ... deserve the title of precursors and founding fathers of math-rock."
The phrase "blind idiot god" comes from horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's description of the god Azathoth.
Read more about Blind Idiot God: Members, Discography
Famous quotes containing the words blind, idiot and/or god:
“A blind man will not thank you for a looking-glass.”
—Eighteenth-century English proverb. Collected in Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia (1732)
“I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.”
—Anne Sullivan (1866–1936)
“Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, or the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)