David Gillespie
Terminus
As smooth as can be, looking forward to the album being released.
The artist - Anais Mulgrew - had her own ideas of how the piece related to the lyrical themes and I have mine, no more or less valid than anyone else. To me it represents the central idea in the 4 song arc that closes the album - the birth, or rebirth, of a new intelligence inside a machine.
Whilst I do enjoy a good tale of heroism in the vein of classic Star Wars etc. that doesn't really qualify as Science Fiction to me. Science Fiction, at its heart, is a medium for the conveyance of ideas and those are the types of stories we focus on. The Asimov stories are about statecraft, the means to control a populace en masse set against a Sci Fi backdrop and the songs on our new album approach different ideas in a similar fashion. The best Sci Fi always has an engaging idea at its core that will stick in your mind regardless of the narrative it's paired with.
As Roy Batty once said - "I want more life, father". We consider what bargain our main character may enter into so that her intellect, consciousness or soul might live on and the circumstances and outcomes that result from her decision.
You are making the incorrect assumption that our songs tell stories rather than trying to cut to the core idea. This is a problem James and I very quickly learned to reconcile. Even the story of a very short 200 page Scif Fi novel is difficult to condense into three verses and a chorus. We mostly take a different approach - focus on an idea, a character, a key incident in the plot whether the source material is of our own creation or not.
Our first album starts in the way you describe, so we wanted something different this time. I'd recommend all your readers track down and buy "The Reapers Spiral" in addition to "A Single Point Of Light".
While we do like to tell a story, we are a heavy metal band; the music is paramount. Maybe some day we'll do something more overtly atmospheric, but if we do it will be under a different name.
These days I will have an idea of the topic of a song while the music is being put together. "Spinning Webs" is an example of one where I more or less completed the music and handed it over to James with a brief of where the song sat in the narrative, characters involved and their motivations. James tends to handle the longer songs better than I do.
There is a lot of shitty, retrograde Heavy Metal being released at the minute but Epic Metal is much the same as it ever was. Within that niche our lyrical bent sets us apart - not only the Sci Fi aspect but because we don't write songs about grand acts of heroism and battle.
Musically speaking I think we have a broader palette than most. As listeners will find on the album we go everywhere from a crawl to a breakneck charge and everything in between.
Natural variation would explain a lot but vocal "patterns" tend to be dictated by the lyrics and even the phrasing of certain words, the latter being something James pays particular attention to.
We dropped some of the elements from the debut that we felt weren't as strong as we would like. There are a few small things we added that have a touch more atmosphere but really we focused on what we feel is our core sound.
The last four songs don't necessarily form a contiguous narrative. They are aspects of a whole and different characters perspectives on incidents throughout that narrative. "Spinning Webs" would chronologically be the beginning of that story but musically fits as the last track. It describes the end of our protagonists natural life, how she seeks to live on and the consequences of the bargain she makes.
That would be an ecumenical matter. More time was spent on "Spinning Webs, Catching Dreams" than any other song - I think that one was reconstructed at least 3 times.
If you have a good turntable, good sound system and clean records then Vinyl is the best format. Most of my listening is digital, though.
It hasn't really been our experience that being into heavy metal makes anyone a better person. Quite the opposite in fact,but it's the same in any walk of life. You'll always find really nice, community minded people, but you'll also find people within that small group who are prepared to tear everything down around them because they want to feel important. So, maybe when we were younger we might have held the view that Metal is a way of life, but as jaded middle aged men, we can see that in comparison to our "real" lives this music really is a only a small part of who we are. We love it,and we've met some truly wonderful people through it, but let's not pretend that it is the most important thing in our lives.
Nothing whatsoever, we've made it pretty clear we aren't playing live shows anymore.
We'll keep writing music and if we feel it's good enough to release, we'll record it. It will be several years before you hear any more from us and any future releases will come as a surprise when we appear to be dead. Exactly like this one did.
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