The Rocks Off 100: Chris Gerhardt, Mastermind of Giant Battle Monster
Welcome to the Rocks Off 100, our portrait gallery of the most compelling profiles and personalities in the far-flung Houston music community -- a lot more than just musicians, but of course they're in there too. See the entire Rocks Off 100 at this link.
Who? Giant Battle Monster, we're fairly certain, is the first Rocks Off 100 inductee to have recruited someone to deliver aborted chicken meat from under his dress live onstage. Delightfully weird, a little disturbing, GMB's aggressive math-rock veers from raunchy death-metal to trippy prog-rock to outre sci-fi sountrack stuff in the course of the group's most recent album, February's Giant Battle Monster Vs. the Subterranean Antler Man.![]()
Photos courtesy of Giant Battle Monster
The four-piece Houston band is the brainchild of possible evil genius Chris Gerhardt, who founded GBM at age 19. "I prefer not to sit still, focus on a single thing or sleep, really," he says.
Gerhart has a music degree and has also trained as an electrical engineer, and says today he works with small radio transmitters ("and pretty soon I'm gonna quit"). With GBM, he's recorded two albums he didn't have to pay for and once covered 25 percent of the country on a 32-date tour with local instro-metal group Cavernous and the now-defunct Barkus, Sly and the Golden Egg.































