Technology can very much be a double edged sword in the world of Metal. Owing to its recent decline in sales almost making years of work redundant however it has also given birth to an entirely new movement. Progressive Metal strives to be unique, creative and truly experimental. Releasing their third album last year, Tesseract are pioneers of the genre. Despite having only released three albums in their life span, bar a couple of EP’s the band’s musicality is absolutely limitless. Creating a compromise between the more progressive arc whilst retaining a memorable sense of melody the band are easily one of the most exciting musical projects to come out of Metal in a long time. Shortly before their set at London’s Koko, guitarist and all round good bloke James Monteith kindly took time out to speak to me about Polaris, Tesseract and their ethos and Cube II : Hypercube…
Listen to full unedited interview below or read the transcript under the Soundcloud link!
So hello and welcome James!
Hi Tristan!
How are you?
I’m very well thanks, how are you?
Very well, I’m looking forward to tonight’s show! How has the tour been going so far?
Yeah it’s been excellent really well attended, the new material has been going down really well couldn’t have asked for a better start to a tour.
You performed last year all over the world really with Polaris was there anywhere that you wanted to try and get to apart from playing an igloo! Are there any areas that you haven’t explored yet?
There’s loads of places that we’ve not been. We’ve been to India a few times but we haven’t gone further into Asia, we haven’t been to Japan for example and also places like Indonesia and China they’re real growing Metal scenes so we would love to get out there one day and we’ve never been to South America that would be great! We’ve never been to the Antarctic, if Metallica do it!
The penguins I’m sure will enjoy the grooves! What about 2016, have you got many more touring plans? I know you’re playing Download…
I think we are mainly focusing on summer festivals after this tour there may be some other things coming up but I’m going to be careful with what I say hahaha! We’re definitely doing a whole run of summer festivals which is going to be great because its the first time that we have done that many in one go and in the Autumn we’ll have to see…
You released Polaris last September, how did you come up with the name? What’s the story behind it?
Well Polaris is basically the North Star and its kind of like, in basic terms its almost like guiding light I suppose. We’ve been through so many changes, so many ups and downs. A revolving door of singers is one thing that we have had to deal with. Somehow we have always sort of managed to put it all together and its all just flowing very naturally in a way it’s maybe a metaphor for how we have ended up where we are.
So it’s something to follow?
Or maybe something subconsciously has helped put it all together.
What have fans reactions been like to the album?
Mostly very good actually which is quite nice, comparing it to our last album. Our last album we had a different singer so that is always going to divide people. There was a lot less of that this time around. I think we were all very happy with Dan because he had come back for the old school fans. I think the song writing has matured a fair bit and for want of a better word become slightly more of an accessible listen. Hopefully reaching a slightly broader audience which is great!
I was going to say that from One to Altered State, One had individual tracks and Altered State became like one continuous track?
Well it’s kind of like four continuous parts, that was kind of divided up but yeah, still long chunks of music.
Do you think Polaris was a compromise of those two?
No, I wouldn’t say that I think it just turned out how it was going to turn out. In Tesseract’s history someone has an idea and then it kind of builds outwards, we’ll put new layers, sections connecting to other sections. For example Concealing Fate is half an hours worth of solid music and that literally just came about because it was like “Oh that fits with that, that fits with that” a bit like Lego I suppose…
A very British analogy!
Or Scandinavian! They’re Danish!
Is Lego Danish? A British heritage is Danish! What themes are on Polaris?
I don’t know any themes its not really, I guess there’s that whole kind of guiding light North Star kind of overriding thing but all the songs are individual songs and again we didn’t intend for it to turn out this way, they just turned into relatively normal length songs compared to our previous work. Because Dan writes all of the lyrics a lot of them are very personal to him. There are some that are about standard day to day things, the song “Survival” is about coping with the fact that having family at home whilst on tour and its a very real thing that he deals with but also some of them are way more abstract and a bit more sort of out there, creative. Ultimately they are things that are personal to him.
What was the recording and writing process like for Polaris?
Acle is the primary song writer and he comes up with lots of the core ideas. There will be a riff with a melody over it and when Acle produces stuff it’s literally like loads of things going on at the same time. As opposed to “oh I’ve written this riff, what do you all think?” He has this great mind for piecing, working out which juxtaposing things would work together. Maybe some of the obvious clean guitar melodies with heavy riffing underneath that’s a basic example of things that he comes up with.
He says “oh I’ve got this chunk of music” and from there I guess everyone starts reading into it with ideas and structures. On this record Dan was very involved from an early stage so his vocal melodies and vocal writing help shape the songs and maybe that’s why they’re more normal song structures, the vocals played a very big part in shaping them. But anyway there is a sort internet back and forth, then there’s a demo and the track builds and then demo usually evolves into the final thing with retake and retake. Everything is built on computer, it’s almost like building a dance track if you like in the methodology.
Do you think that technology has influenced the band’s sound?
I think technology is absolutely vital for the band’s sound. Because of the way a lot of the complex pieces fit together it’s not something that at least we would be able to put together without a computer. There’s just too much going on. It’s too complicated whereas you need a computer so you can piece it together and then you learn it if that makes sense? A lot of its written before anyone can play any of it, they can play chunks of it, play a riff but can’t play the whole thing because it’s kind of been written digitally if you like! Not all of it but some of it is but without a computer it would be impossible to make I think.
It’s not sort of Black Sabbath sort of stuff is it!
No… Should be though!
What was it like getting Dan back in the band? Did you want to revisit certain areas or did you want to try new ground?
I don’t think that we have ever had a set agenda of what we want to do its just been a simple case of here are these ideas and where should we take it. Ultimately I think we want the end product to be interesting and exciting to us and if we’re enjoying hopefully people will do. The key thing to do is to try not to sound like other things, which is obviously quite hard in this day and age but I think that’s basically what we try and do. That’s another of the reasons that we moved away from the more aggressive vocals, it’s not because we don’t like them, it’s just that when we tried them it ends. Like this band or it ends like that band… We’re just trying to be as unique as possible.
Do you think that was partly to do with the fact that Altered State was completely clean vocals and you learnt from that?
No, not really I think Altered State was clean because of the kind of direction we were gong in for the same reason I just said but also Ashe wasn’t really an aggressive vocalist at all so we basically capitalised on his strengths. So that’s basically why he came out sounding like an angel because that’s what’s he is best at doing!
Where did the band name come from?
Again the name has existed since it was Acle’s solo project, if I tell you where it came from it’s not that interesting. It’s a fourth dimensional cube so if you imagine a cube in a four dimensional space, in one dimension you have say a dot, two dimensions is a square, then cube and you could imagine what the next shape would be but you can’t because we don’t live in a fourth dimensional space. It was kind of a hard concept to get your head around!
Super proggy…
Yeah it’s just nerdy and mathematical.
I don’t think it’s nerdy, it reflects the band!
Oh no Acle was watching a really terrible sci if movie called Cube II : Hypercube..
Cube is awesome!
Cube is amazing. Cube II, I don’t know apparently it’s terrible but apparently he got the idea for the name from that haha!
I think that is Cube II’s only redeeming factor!
What about your own personal influences, as a guitarist who are your personal influences?
I don’t know it depends which era of my life! When I started playing I know my dad brought me up listening to all old blues rock n roll and stuff and there was a band called George Thoroughgood and The Destroyers and there was this track called “Madison Blues” that had this nasty sort of guitar that was super heavy, at least I thought it was when I was a kid. That was when I really started to fall in love with the sound of a guitar. I started learning piano and sort of moved away from guitar music but then I discovered Guns ‘n’ Roses and it was just really exciting. So I started picking up the guitar then and then, yes early years it was all the Metallica’s, Slayer, Megadeth, Pantera, Sepultura… The growing Metal bands from the mid nineties and then I got into more proggy stuff so I listened to Dream Theater right back to Rush’s back catalogue… Sorry I could ramble on for a long time!
No, no ramble on as much as you want! What Rush? Moving Pictures, 2112 and things like that?
The second most recent record, the one that came out in 2012 I really enjoy that actually! Some amazing tracks on that! A bit of electronica stuff, the early Dubstep movement was really exciting before Skrillex turned it into what it is now, which I don’t mind but it’s it’s not really as exciting as it was. Lots of the Bristolian trip hop kind of stuff, Portishead, Massive Attack that sort of thing!
Wow so it’s pretty eclectic then!
I’ve been around for a while haha!
I was going to say do you have a kind of compositional point of view? Have you got a bit more of understanding of music as a whole?
To be fair I’m really rusty, I did my grade five theory half my life ago now and haven’t really looked at it since. In all honesty I’m rusty as hell!
What is your personal favourite concept album?
I don’t know! I’m not too sure, it’s kind of hard to tell what a concept album is I guess.
Because it’s quite ambiguous?
Well unless a band days “this is a concept album” Name me a concept album!
2112, The Astonishing, Mastodon have done a fair few..
Do they state that they are concept albums? I don’t know is the answer haha!
Right now what do you personally think of the, I hesitate to use the word Djent movement. Do you think it’s something that is going to slowly go away?
I think there is a time and a place for it, bands have come out doing that sort of thing. I don’t think it’s going to stick as a sort of genre name but I think it’s a nice, I actually don’t mind it as a term to group together a bunch of bands that are doing something. At one point it was actually stepping outside the box of regular Metal. There was about seven years ago now, well it was more than ten years ago when all this stuff was happening online. It was just like full on Metalcore, everyone wanted to be Killswitch Engage, they still do now actually! Like every kind of newish thing it gets saturated with loads of stuff that sounds the same. Do people still use the D word? I dunno!
Maybe I’m old fashioned! Do you think that it has quite a lot to do with the fact that it is UK based?
I think there are lots of bands here but then obviously Periphery are the band that popularised the word with their “Got Djent?” T shirts and Animals As Leaders, Intervals but I think its quite a global thing, Skyharbor from India… It started on the intent, normal scenes happened in person whereas this was brought out by a bunch of nerds living online which kind of made it an international thing everyone hung out in chat rooms rather than in person! Which makes it sound really sad haha!
What would you say is an album that you have been really listening to over the last six months to a year?
Something that’s grabbed my attention… I can think of what I am listening to at the moment! The new record by The Algorithm is phenomenal. He basically mixes electronica and sort of tech-y metal it’s a progressive approach to writing .Very interesting song structures but what he is a master of taking metallic sounds but then transposing them into electronic music. Loads of people of the last decade have been splicing Metal and Electronica together and it’s always more, to me sounded like Metal glued on top of a beat whereas he really does manage to merge the genres.
Synthesises both genres…
Definitely, also a lot of rhythmic programming is based on sort of Metal rhythms and I have never heard that in any other form of Electronica really.
Triplets and things like that?
Well like Metal kick pattern, double kick sort of stuff and basically drum beats that Metal would play but programmed in Electronica. So yeah tat quite a fun record! I revisited last year’s Steven Wilson record after going to see him. Hand Cannot Erase!
Well thank you ever so much for speaking with us James and have a fantastic evening!
Thank you!
