Inescapable Fate

How long has the band been going? I really should know this… I’ve been playing with them for a couple of years, but they were already together for a few years before that.

Wow. So it’s a quite a long standing band then. Yeah, but it’s… piss poor, because we’ve only played about 5 or 6 gigs. Just far too busy really. We practice every week but we just don’t play many gigs, though recently we’ve been heading out more. We played the Fiddler’s Elbow in Camden last term, with a couple of other thrash and rock bands. It was pretty well received. We’ve got a couple more gigs lined up this term.

Would you say you guys are death metal, thrash metal, or somewhere in between…? I heard someone calling you brutal death metal. Oh, we’re not brutal by any standards. We only have about two blast beats in our entire repertoire. I think Greg (Power, founder of the Felix Music Nights last year) got it into his head, but I’d say we’re more thrashy, but the vocals are death.

Cookie Monster style. Yeah, well there’s a bit more diction. I’ve heard worse than Sean’s vocals. You can make out what he’s saying if you listen closely.

Hold on, my recorder’s running out of juice… Let me just delete these traffic recordings. Do you use that to record traffic?

Among other things. Mainly to get source material for samples. I’ve recorded some rain sounds before with one of those.

Oh cool. Do you use them in the band or for your own solo projects? It’s for my own stuff. I’ve got a few tracks on my DoC homepage, of all places, that are more or less different than what we play in the band. Sort of like the stuff you played at KABLAAM, I quite enjoy the sort of atmospheric sounds. At the moment I’m really into sort of groovy stuff, like polyrhythms, which I’ve been doing a lot of recently. Synths as well… I love electronics basically.

Groovy how? Drum based or oscillatory? The genre I’m in at the moment is called ‘djent’.

I read about that in your interview with Greg last term. Isn’t that metal though? It is metal. It’s kinda like meow meow – the sort of thing you either love or hate (I think he meant Marmite – Ed). The idea is you play a very simple 4/4 beat and the bass drum follows the guitar… it’s not necessarily the idea but that’s how a lot of people do it. So you have a steady back beat with something really funky over the top. You separate your hands from your feet, sort of. It’s quite syncopated which is why you could call it groovy. I suppose Meshuggah pioneered that style. I really enjoy music which has a lot of polyrhythms. That’s not really what we play with Inescapable Fate though, because it often comes to a stage when it just becomes wankery. We’re a lot more straight up.

That’s cool. I didn’t know you did solo electronics. Yeah. I find myself listening to a lot of sad, atmospheric music. Just long… long, sad tracks… I must sound like such a miserable fuck haha

That’s okay. I think that’s what drew me into metal. There’s a lot of attack but there can also be a lot of really strong melodies.

Yeah. I think what most people don’t seem to grasp about metal, and why they tend to just shun it away, is that they don’t see the cathartic side of it. When I was playing metal I found it to be such a powerful release of energy that’s pretty hard to find otherwise. Yeah. I guess my advice to anyone who wants to get into metal is not to take it too seriously. When I play or just listen to it I just can’t help but want to move, it’s kind of bizarre. When you’ve got a kick drum up at volume and it resonates and you can feel it in your body… There’s a lot of fanatics who are really elitist but you know, if you don’t like that music, that’s fine, don’t worry about. But I find that a lot of metal musicians I meet are actually really open minded. There’s no point putting yourself in a box and listen to only one kind of music.

I actually did that once. For two years I would listen to, of all metal genres, black metal. The really deep underground stuff. At one point I realised that it was just stagnant. The whole genre is about achieving a point of perfection in the sound, being cult and true and whatever. Ironically, it’s about being as under produced and grim as possible. Metal has merged with so many genres now, it’s almost ridiculous to list them… you can get symphonic metal, jazz fusion…

You can attach the metal tag to anything… that’s the problem with rap metal. Yeah and it sounds stupid at first but it does help to open your ears a lot and you can end up listening to straight jazz afterwards.

I meant to ask you about dubstep actually. It just seems to release a lot of… displaced anger. I think dubstep is actually electronic ‘djent’. You can really draw a parallel because dubstep is really about dropping a thump when you least expect it. Some of the stuff the Music Tech guys do I really enjoy. Breaks and things. I don’t really mind… I think the most, I wouldn’t say irritating, but sad thing, is when you see people listening to music and they’re just not really doing anything. I find it very difficult to not even tap your foot… like you said, at least with dubstep there is a release.

I guess there are also the more intellectual styles of music like jazz and IDM. Yeah, but that’s really for the musicians I think. At a lot of metal gigs, the audience is full of... not nerds, but… even the bands say it would be nice if our music would be more accessible to people who don’t understand how it works. But I guess that’s sort of the attraction for a lot of people, understanding what’s going on and the satisfaction of knowing that for example the next three bars are going to be all messed up but you actually know all the notes. I don’t really expect that for a lot of the things I play. But it’s nice every once in a while when someone comes up and says, oh “I enjoyed your music” even if they don’t have a clue what you were doing, but that’s fine because part of the satisfaction is achieving that. You know, like when you see someone get up on stage and they’re thinking “oh, I’m going to start playing in fives now, just to be an ass” and no one else will notice, right, because it just gets lost. But if it sounds good, it sounds good. That being said, in jam nights I rarely play metal because metal’s really hard to improvise well on. It often ends in tears. It’s a lot easier to make interesting improve in jazz or something.

Either that or it just ends up sort of psychedelic. Yeah, if you have a looper it can be a lot of fun but in metal you just end up chugging along on the same riff.

And noodle a bit. Yeah, the stereotypical solos as well…

I bumped into an old friend earlier, whose quite the metalhead and he was telling me about a bit of controversy surrounding the upcoming Download festival. Apparently Chase & Status are playing straight after Machine Head. Why do people care? You go to see one, the other or both.

I have a feeling there are a lot of closet ravers among the metalheads. Yeah, I don’t get why it’s controversial.

What about The Prodigy playing alongside Black Sabbath and Metallica? I would say Black Sabbath are less heavy than The Prodigy, who use a lot of guitar samples anyway. I think it’s cool. It means that they can guarantee enough of an audience for that sort of thing.

Apparently Lou Reed collaborated with Metallica. He played some stuff on their latest album.

I’ve never listened to it but I’ve always heard great things about Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, which is basically 6 hours of clanging metal noises and feedback. MMM has influenced so much later music that I almost don’t feel the need to listen to those records. Just the idea of it... Yeah, I’m sure you can recognise it in a lot of music.

Why do you think metal music is called metal anyway? I don’t know... it’s really stupid but I always thought it was because rock was called rock. But then I thought, well why call it rock?

Rock & roll... Maybe it’s because metal is heavier than rock?

How does the rock roll? Like the pelvis of Elvis? I have no idea. I thought you were going to ask about more capital D’s besides dubstep.

Oh yeah, I wanted to talk about death. haha none of our songs are about death actually. A lot of them seem to be about the financial collpase, like ‘Inflate/Deflate’, because Laurie seems to have a real problem with that.

Nice. So what’s with the “morbid fascination of death” to quote a certain Norwegian band? That’s like asking why most other music is obsessed with love? Some people might find that just as insipid. I personally don’t care. Lyrics are just noise between solos, right? I think there are more offensive topics than death that are commonly dealt with.

I’m somewhat puzzled by what some people are capable of singing about. Well there’s a band called Necrophagus, which refers to the practice of eating dead people. I think that’s part of the joke though. It’s not like some guy actually wants to each your child. Another famous one is a song by Bloodbath called ‘Eaten’ which is a guy who wants someone to find someone to eat him. It’s based on a true story about a German guy who posted an ad in a newspaper a couple years ago. That just shows that a lot of these things are not that far beyond the realm of what happens in the world.

I guess love and death are the central themes in our lives. Love sells more.