Interview
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Hal - vocals First, thanks for having accept to answer these some questions. thank you for offering them, it’s great to get some contact from
overseas! Can you tell the readers a bit about the band's history ? interlock was formed in 1997 by john tyrell, our guitarist and programmer, with syan our bassist. the band spent several years with some different lineups, like not using a live drummer until about 2000. we’ve almost always had a female and male singer but you could say that the frontman balance only equalled out (in style and approach) in recent years. we also decided to recruit a second guitarist, chris, in 2004, which fitted in with the music taking a more metal slant. as some people may have noticed, we recently took on christina gajny on vocals, replacing our last female singer who sung on the album, she’s our latest addition to the band and has to be heard to be believed. one of the biggest drives behind interlock’s music and identity is to
create new things, to blend aspects that haven’t necessarily been put
together before and to push forward to bring on the next wave of modern
extreme music. we are the way ahead. What are your biggest musical influences ? there’s no one specific band that unanimously influences us, this is because we all come from such different musical backgrounds. whilst we share a common bond of all liking metal, it’s a bit like saying that 6 of us enjoy eating food - there’s just so many angles to it. it’s a good thing, because it means that our output is really varied. this said, it’s fair to say that we all have a fondness for some of the more industrial and inventive / electronic metal acts like fear factory, static X, strapping young lad or similar. As a band our influences are varied from old and new styles of metal to dance and ambient music, and you can hear it in our sound. John has always listened to a lot of electronic music as well as metal, and I really appreciated bands like GGFH and Scorn when they started to penetrate the metal scene in the early 90s. I think it was mine and John’s mutual appreciation of that scene that pulled me into Interlock in the first place. Having said that though, a lot of my drumming influences have come from bands like Porcupine Tree alongside the traditional metal influences.
Can you speak to us about your album called " Crisis//Reinvention " ? ‘crisis//reinvention’ is our debut album on anticulture records. having recorded it before we signed to our record label, we made sure that we were really confident with all aspects of it. it’s a sleek slab of finest cyber metal, complete with its very own interactive section for our more technological audiences. if you want to know what the future of music sounds like, go check it out. Crisis is our first full album, although we have previously released a couple of tapes and a split album with Needleye. It’s an amalgamation of all of our influences. Whilst remaining an industrial/metal band or whatever you want to call us, we’ve tried to bring something new into the writing. For example - sounds that you don’t really hear in other metal music that have previously been more at home in the ambient or techno scenes. But we’ve not lost our roots, and we’ve also tried to retain the brutality of metal on songs like Skinless and Creed. As a band none of us are afraid to experiment, and Id like to think that we’ve come up with something genuinely new and original. But undoubtedly still metal enough not to lose the point.
How did you proceed for the composition ? we recorded it at our studio in central london, john produced it and created the artwork for it. he has a production company (www.myspace.com/deepwaterproductions) and has worked on acts like needleye, seventh harmonic and tangaroa. our approach to recording is perhaps a little odd - we’re mostly
nocturnal, recording through the night as it’s best for when our studio
time is uninterrupted. we dealt with all the different sections is
increments. there’s a lot of attention to detail in how we record. and a
lot of energy drinks.
Its mainly John again, but everybody gets a look in and puts forward riffs and ideas. Then we proceed via a method called the Tyrell democracy, whereby the vote goes to the most people who agree with John. Or something… haha. No, seriously, it works well. From my point of view, John will write and record on his computer and put guide drums down too, but its up to me if I want to use them or come up with something new. John writes the majority of the music, but it’s not without a fair
amount of input from the rest of the band. occasionally one of us may
bring in a riff and it’ll make its way in somewhere, or at other times a
particular style of music and how it may be incorporated is discussed. a
great deal of the song’s evolution happens in the practice environment,
where through time people add their own flourishes and nuances.
Over to you I think Hal... the title of the album relates to the sufferance of some sort of trauma and its relative period of recovery or healing through some sort of change. you can apply that to what you will, to be honest, although i think it’s clear that in most people’s cases it’s about emotional matters. most of the songs’ lyrics are based on a certain moment in my life that happened (and was resolved) shortly before we started recording. it was something of a crisis for me and it took me a long time to make my way out of it, during this i managed to base a lot of lyrical material on that process. most of the words in that album deal with how someone can choose to treat you, or see you, and i’m particularly interested in how the human mind can create hatred from a very opposite emotion. dehumanisation is something that came to mind a lot throughout our recording.
a few of us are involved in some way with outside projects, of varying shapes, sizes and styles, though interlock is our absolute priority across the board. those of us doing other projects are doing it mostly because they provide some different angle from the work we’re doing within the band. for instance, my other musical work is mostly technical death metal based. At present I think we’re all firmly focused on Interlock. We’ve all played in bands before of course – mainly in the metal genre. In the past I played with Salem Orchid (who were later to re-invent themselves as Akercocke) which was very fast and extreme music. But then there was my brief flirt with indie music in the 90’s with Nightnurse - which, um, doesn’t really compare to Interlock at all! I recently got asked to play some guitar for a gabba/death metal project, which I may do if I have time. As long as its good, I’m happy to try and bring my influences into many styles of music. But I don’t stray away from metal for too long.. I get withdrawal symptoms!
What's your favourite " Crisis//Reinvention " track , and why ? It’s difficult to single out anything as we’re all still in that stage of being really proud of our album as a whole. for myself it would either be ‘cause’ because it’s what i rate as full on cyber metal, or maybe ‘straight’ as it’s the song which i find pushes my vocal boundaries the most. I’m really liking In Stasis at the moment. Oddly enough I’ve not really been listening to this track for a long time – maybe because it was one of the first we started writing for the album and I’ve got more caught up in the more recent songs. But this track has a real groove to it with a lot of techno influences in the sounds, but its still very heavy and very dark, and brutal in its delivery. Our diversity has paid off well here I think. By contrast, I really like Creed too because it’s just short, sharp, extreme and to the point.
What are your favourite all times bands and albums ? This really is one question where you can ask any member of Interlock and get completely different answers. speaking only for myself, i’d say that it’s between ‘as the flower withers’ by my dying bride, ‘informis infinitas inhumaintas’ by origin, ‘city’ by strapping young lad, ‘the bleeding’ by cannibal corpse and ‘here in after’ by immolation. for non metal, i’d say ‘into the labyrinth’ by dead can dance, ‘secrets of the beehive’ by david sylvian, ‘the nephilim’ by fields of the nephilim and ‘outisde’ by david bowie. My favourite albums are the ones which have really pushed in new directions. Going back, Dimension Hatross by Voivod for its sheer experimentalism for example. And early Killing Joke – another band who’ve always pushed against the grain. Also bands like Celtic frost, Bathory, Morbid Angel... A lot of my favourites are rooted in early dark metal, but currently I’m listening to a lot of Origin and Meshuggah, two bands who really seem to be setting the standards in speed and complexity at the moment – particularly drumming wise. And some of the Opeth stuff is really good too.
What's your opinion about the international metal scene ? it’s difficult to identify it as one singular scene, since it has so many strains within it. i’d say there’s been a lot of give and take with styles and genres though, much of the current trend for melodic yet harsh metal has come from early 90s european bands and has come full circle with the US, which i find slightly amusing, a bit like selling ice to eskimos. you can see how the media picks up on trends of style, it definitely seems like the right time to be in a female fronted goth metal band, or an emo looking riffs-based band. it’s something which i’ve never been very interested in following as i don’t see the point in being like anyone else that’s around, musically. A lot of my favourite bands do better in Europe than in the UK. I think the European scene is waiting for us, and I think that I speak for the whole band when I say that we can’t wait to get out there and tour.
Do you have any funny or strange stories about the band you can share with us ? How long have you got? We’re good at funny and strange.. although suddenly I can’t remember any stories. Its late… Hal? we were performing at an outdoor festival this summer in the UK. backstage, there was an area where the bands who were next set to go onstage were to place their equipment, protected by makeshift marquee / canopy. about 15 minutes before we were supposed to go on, a freak gust of wind completely took out the canopy roofing and collapsed on our guitarist chris’ head whilst he was tuning his guitar, it also destroyed part of our drumkit frame, the same mini-hurricane almost took down the sound tent a few feet behind. We later found that a tent had totally blown away and landed on the motorway!
Yes – through Europe in early-mid 2006 hopefully. We’ve recently hooked up with an agent – Factory Music - who are starting to sort this out for us now. we’re currently touring several points in the UK at the moment, with a plan to come over to france early next year, we’re really looking forward to trying out the European metal audiences and to show them what we get up to, live. i don’t want to give away too much, but don’t expect us to just stand their staring at our shoes - we earn our riders! make sure you keep your eyes on the ‘tour’ section of our website.
we’re releasing an single / EP for the song ‘skinless’ from the album, featuring our new female singer’s vocals, together with some amazing remixes from numerous acts like Miocene, John Callaghan and Shane Cough and our B-side ‘blue’. there will also be a video which is coming out some point this month. Immediately – to tour Crisis around Europe and later on to reach America and Japan. And hopefully find time to start writing some new songs. Crisis is only the start, and I only joined the band very shortly before we began recording. Personally Im looking forward to bringing more complex cross-rhythms into the Interlock sound. Oh, and more blast beats! we’re preparing some new material for our next release, without
wanting to say too much; be set for some surprising new angles on metal
and a lot of forced boundaries. And finally, can you say some words for my radio show Metal Choc ? be brutal, be boundless and never trust a person who has watched a spice girls video more than twice.
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