Just under a month ago we had the pleasure of speaking to one of Progressive Metal’s heralded heroes before their blistering set at London’s Electric Ballroom. Acting as a double header of sorts Haken were not one to miss in the double package with their recent stint with Between The Buried and Me. Having previously spoken to both Rich and Ross we thought perhaps it was time to get a different side of the coin. Keyboardist Deigo Tejeida was gracious enough to speak with us about what the state of Haken’s new album is, the story behind Crystallised and his shared passion for Phillip Glass.

What about from a musical stand point then, how does it develop, because it’s a long track! 

(4:45) It is a long track! I guess one of the few things, we thought about redoing the demo’s. I don’t know if you already knew about that but Crystallised was originally “Snow” from the 2007 demo. So that demo was released I wasn’t in the band, Charlie wasn’t in the band and obviously Connor wasn’t in the band. So it was a different line up, different sound, it was a different direction back then. We got quite a few requests by fans saying “oh you should re do that, this is really cool!”. Most people say it’s a really nice tune but the production is not great…

So the first idea was to just re do the song and just re record it, but then we felt like that;s been done you know? We need to add up some of our personalities. We thought that at this point, we have matured or evolved as a band. We have a different direction, we have a different influence and we work together differently so let’s just do this tune as we would at this point in our career. We added some things, took out some things. We tried to make the choruses a bit more epic keeping the Haken side of it of what we’re doing now with our sound. 

And adding Mike Portnoy with a gong! 

Of course! When we were playing on tour with Next To None his sons band, Mike Portnoy was around for most of the tour so Mike Portnoy was doing the gong as well as his song Max Portnoy. It was a good moment! 

Can you tell us anything about the elusive fourth album? (6:28)

Listen to the unedited interview with Diego above to hear all there is to know about Haken and more!