AD NAUSEAM – jsme hudební nerdi

AD NAUSEAM - we are music nerds

An interview with Ad Nauseam.

Ad NauseamItalians Ad Nauseam are not one of the typical death-black bands. Their approach reminds academic musicians who compose sophisticated and not easily accesible music. And since their album this year is sure to be part of the past year’s “best of“ charts, we asked a few questions regarding (not only) their upcoming show at Josefstadt.
Guitarist and vocalist Andrea P. answered.

--- --- ---

You have released new record Imperative Imperceptible Impulse, where a lot of composition work can be heard. What did you want to say through the record, how did you want to attract the listener?

Nothing of this work has been done with the listener in mind. We just compose music to the best of our possibilities to satisfy ourselves. III is a journey into music composition, it is a trip in the unconscious, a journey in the abyss. A great deal of it has been done as research work, exploring new sonorities inspired by the great works of the past. Music is our greatest interest and a huge passion for all of us. Everything is there for a reason, nothing has been planned, it just grew like that, like an evolving living being.

Ad Nauseam - Imperative Imperceptible ImpulseIII is almost an hour-long record, full of songs above eight minutes, where there are only a few moments of respite. Wouldn't a couple of shorter songs help the listeners to navigate their way through the record, or was it the intention to „drown" them?

Again, nothing has been done with the listener in mind, frankly, we don't care about any other listener but ourselves. Call us selfish if you want but to us having the purpose to entertain people is the recipe of inner failure. You will like this music you like only if you resonate with it. It's all about the journey that it allows you to do inside yourself. If people like it, good! If they don't, good as well! If we wanted to make music appealing to people we probably stopped playing long time ago.

I never call it "songs" when I speak about our music, it's just something else. Every "piece" has been composed taking inspiration from many different kinds of music, but the music structure comes from classical music. Usually, symphonies, quartets, chamber music and so on are a "history". Like a book, there is a beginning, many intertwined evolutions and an end. It's a story, a journey. To make a good story you need to make it interesting and to do that you need time to unfold it. Every piece just takes the time it requires for its full, complete existence. I don't think there is anybody sane complying that Dostoevskij's Crime and Punishment is too long, nobody complaining about any Shostakovich's masterpiece to be too long.

The instruments in your music „talk together", leading a complex dialogue. Another important influence apart from Deathspell Omega and Gorguts could be classical music. Is this more or less by chance, as you listen to such music only for occasional diversion, or do you dedicate more time to studying it and you also wanted to apply specific approaches?

It's not a chance. As I already stated we are all "music nerds". We listen to a very broad spectrum of music kinds. Personally, I have been imprinted with classical music since very early ages as my parents were hard into it. Once you start with it, it will be always with you. I could say that I resonate with DsO and Gorguts because of classical music, as in both you can find solid traces of the last century avantgarde/contemporary classical.

You perform as a quartet, with three string instruments. The album is full of interlinked motives, didn't you feel this as a limitation for expressing some ideas? Didn't you miss some other instruments, or is the current form sufficient to fully express your thoughts?

Yes, a standard metal quartet is quite limited especially if you think that two instruments out of 4 are the same, there are not many options in the sound spectrum palette. If you think about an average orchestra the possibilities are endless with so many different instruments. But then one can argue that most of the best music ever written is for piano. What we do is to express the most we can with our tonal possibilities. That's why me (guitar) and Matteo G. (guitar) never do the same thing. That will make things boring and we will lose expression possibilities. Polyphony is one of the things that make music interesting, in my point of view.

Talking about instrumentation – wouldn't you enjoy to compose a fully orchestral track, or compose something with a symphonic orchestra? Wouldn't it be kitchy in your eyes? Would the sound of an orchestra offer you sufficient means to evoke the sinister, furious atmosphere?

Yes, orchestral parts can become kitchy when used in an oversimplified way just to support guitars, as it happens in many symphonic black metal bands that use keyboard-generated strings in their music. Our case is quite different as all the orchestral parts both in Imperative Imperceptible Impulse and in Nihil Quam Vaquitas Ordinatum Est have been recorded instrument by instrument by me. In any orchestral part there are 30 to 100 lines of violins, pianos, and other instruments all lined up one over the other to obtain a whole huge sound. It has been a huge job. Done this way one minute of music usually requires 3-4 days of work just to be recorded. In NQVOE, in „Key To Timeless Laws" there is even a solo performed with dissonant violins. Yes, composing fully orchestral parts is something I enjoy quite a lot.

Ad NauseamThe sound, despite a lot of dissonant tones, is rather harmonious, it's essentially clean and natural. How long did the production work take compared to recording? You don't trust in modern, compressed production?

Ad NauseamIt's not a matter of trust, it's a matter of sound. I am the sound engineer of the band since 2003, I'm not new to this job, and to me, compression is an extremely useful and sensitive tool. If used right it can glue instruments together to make sound many instruments as a whole band. Used in the modern sense it's a tool to make a band sound flat, mono-dimensional, boring and unintelligible. Just take any complex extreme modern production and focus on the guitars when the vocals kick in. Are you still able to understand well what guitars are doing? Focus on the bass guitar when there are double kicks. The bass guitar (if there was any!) magically disappear. In the most compressed one, everything disappears for 70-100ms every kick hit (listen to the cymbals "whoosh" effect, just as an example!). If you never heard about it just look for the "loudness war" on the internet. Since the early 2000s studios are overusing compressors and limiters more and more to obtain more volume from their records, sacrificing dynamics, three-dimensionality, space and clearness. After thousands of tests and listens and we concluded that we are not willing to make our records sound lame just to increase the record average volume. Everybody has a volume knob to do that. A record will never sound loud if there is no dynamics. You need to have softness to have loudness.

We have already said that the sound of the new release is very organic and pleasant to listen to, also very lively. However, I can't get rid of the feeling that in some frequencies there is not enough density, and therefore it is less aggressive. Are you still content with the result, or is there something that you would do differently? And do you think that all the energy spent on the sound of the album was worth it, or maybe it would be fine to just send the record to someone to just do a standard mix/master? Do you think fans will appreciate all the nitty gritty effort that went into this?

We are facing a historical moment when people are finally recognizing that modern productions sound flat and lifeless. Many still perceive modern production as „powerful" but there is a growing slice of music nerds that have enough experience to understand that this is simply not true. And this is not a matter of taste, it's something objective, you just need to make a fair comparison. To make a fair comparison you should compare a modern production with a dynamic one at the same RMS volume, something that is not so easy to do if you don't have a daw. Once you do that you will understand that feeling of aggressiveness of an overcompressed modern production will just instantly disintegrate when compared with a dynamic one. At the same volume, a well-mixed dynamic record will always sound more punchy and powerful as there is room to fully describe percussive elements, whether the modern one will sound distorted and "cheap". If you squish everything to a square wave there is no room for the kick/snare "shockwaves", no room to describe a groovy bass guitar. But don't take my word for that, there is a super simple test you can do. Just look to the last Morbid Angel album "Kingdoms Disdained (Raw Mastered Version - Mastered by Trey Azagthoth)" and compare it with the original master. The trey Azatoth master is done the same way I work. By respecting music dynamics. Keep in mind that the best sounding records ever done (Pink Floyd's The Wall as an example) are done this way.

I am a perfectionist in what I do, to an insane level. Every time I finish mixing/mastering a record I have regrets for years. This time I have been able to listen III in many professionally calibrated listening rooms and the result is that it's the first time I don't have any regrets. I would not change a single thing. So yes, the energy (and money) spent on the sound is well is worthed, I would do that again and again, as at the moment I don't know of any studio working the way I do. Again, I don't care so much what people think about it, with time they will understand. The only thing that matter is that to me and to us, it just sounds perfect.

Last but not least, I'm starting to work with bands that understand this recording philosophy (www.mstrsoundstudio.org). I just finished mixing and master the new album for your fellow countrymen death metal monsters Heaving Earth and the Italian destroyer machine Continuum of Xul. You should definitely keep an eye on that.

Ad NauseamFrom our conversation, it is clear that the music of Ad Nauseam does not belong to the more common, let alone mainstream, part of the metal scene. It draws on dissonant death and black metal, packed in avantgarde frame laced with sulphur. How would you categorize this „hell symphony" yourselves, and what would you like to achieve with your music and band?

We all despise categorizations. Putting oversimplified labels on music is something we try by all our means to avoid, it does not make much sense, even if we are used to putting labels on everything because of our language and the way our brain/consciousness work. Eastern philosophies have something to say about that. A band name is more than enough. We are just trying to play the music we would love to discover in a record, the music that would resonate so much with us to give us goosebumps. That is our direction, that will be hopefully our future.

The classical music influence was already mentioned above. Even though your work is sinister and furious, and I can't imagine it working as a party banger, it could be suitable as a background to an exhibition of Zdislaw Bekinski or as a soundtrack to a short movie sequence. Where else do you draw your influences for Ad Nauseam, and could you imagine yourselves as composers of movie soundtracks in your current form?

The list of bands, composers, and artists of any kind in general from which we draw our influences is too long to be written here. Moreover many underestimate the power of the anti-influences. The list of artists we don't like is way longer and equally important as they help to take an opposite direction. No, I can't imagine us as soundtrack composers. At the moment we like our art to stay as abstract as music is. There is something absolutely beautiful in the art of organizing acoustical vibrations, even if somebody could argue a movie is just an organized sequence of electromagnetic waves hitting your eye.

I don't have the lyrics, so I am wondering how to interpret the meaning of Imperative Imperceptible Impulse and how does this correspond with the cover image of the record? What is actually mysterious about it? I see mountains, river, waves, elements… is it aimimng below the surface, somewhere to the edge of the world? Doesn't it paraphrase Death Haven, your original name?

You can find the lyrics anywhere on the internet. No, it doesn't. The meaning of III lyrics is very personal and bounded to some very dark moments of my life. Most of the lyrics, like the music, come from an unconscious place. When I wrote III lyric down its meaning was not completely clear to me. Unlike conventional metal lyrics, is nothing intrinsically negative, quite the opposite, it's a reprocessing, a meditation, a look into the self, a handhold to life, a search for deeper meaning. Now III lyrics make perfect sense to me. A lyric is just a sequence of words, as music is a sequence of notes. In both cases, if they resonate with you, with your past, with your unconscious, you will recognize, you will feel it. This resonance to my experience depends a lot on the moment you are living. It may not click now but it maybe will in years, as it happened many times with books, music, and poetry during my life.

If your first record was dynamic, furious and relentless, III meanders a bit more and is a bit calmer, and is definitely weirder, sicklier and more uneasy. Do you already have an idea of future steps for Ad Nauseam, or have you already reached the intended form with III, which you just now plan to refine?

We don't know where life will bring us, and we like it. We don't plan, we don't schedule, we simply don't care about having that kind of control. There will be another album when it will be ready, and we are not 100% sure about that. We just care about doing the music we like, hopefully we will be able to continue this journey along with the one on this earth.

Ad NauseamIn 2015, you played in the Brutal Assault festival in Czechia. If we are not mistaken, it was one of your first live shows, yet it left great impressions. This year, you will play in the same place as a part of the down-sized 'Brutal'. Can we expect something else from you in Josefstadt beyond the live rendition of the new songs? Have you changed your approach to live shows since?

We would not like to anticipate anything. If you want to see us just be there. To us playing in BA means a lot, we are very affectionate to it since 2009. Since then we are regular visitors. We attended a lot of festivals and I strongly believe BA is one of the best, at least in Europe.

Thanks for your very interesting questions.

Review of Imperative Imperceptible Impulse

www.facebook.com/adnauseamofficial

aktuálně

diskuze