Bleed The Sky Interview

Interview
Noah Robinson
Bleed The Sky

Lineup:
Kyle Moorman – Lead & Rhythm Guitars
Noah Robinson – Vocals
Wayne Miller II – Lead & Rhythm Guitars
Luke "Puck" Andersen – Samples, Sequencing
Austin D'Amond – Drums & Vocal Support
Casey Kulek – Bass & Vocal Support

Noah Robinson of Bleed The Sky (Photo: Erika Kristen Watt)

United States of Disas-Tour
American Head Tour
Diecast
Index Case
BLEED THE SKY
10/31/05
Metro
Interviewer: Karma E. Omowale
Photos: Erika Kristen Watt

"Why are we letting these guys get to us when they are saying we ripped off Chimaira when we’re friends with them? But I mean if we were ripping them off, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be friendly to us!"

Bleed The Sky will undoubtedly be more than a well-kept secret for long. I am sure they will also rise above the swirl of critical bane comparing the band to that of Chimaira. In truth, this Orange County six-piece has been kicking ass first and taking names second since forming a mere two years ago. Poised to take the States by storm on their current jaunt with American Head Charge and Diecast, they are armed with the recently released Paradigm In Entropy. There may no stopping this band, then again, why would anyone stand in the way of a speeding bullet?

I had the pleasure of meeting the band’s lively frontman, Noah Robinson the previous evening after the opening night show here in Chicago on the American Head Charge show. Noah was kind enough to phone in the next day as he discussed their debut album, their connect with My Ruin, musical influences, and the band’s obsession with labelmates Meshuggah.

Karma: First, I’d like to say thank you very much for doing the interview, Noah!

Karma: You guys definitely kicked ass last night; I was very impressed with your set.

Karma: Since you only have one night under your belt, how do you think the rest of the tour will go?

Noah: I’m hoping even better. The first night was the one we were really worried about you know as far as getting along with the other bands. It’s a different vibe when you go up on stage in front of a crowd that’s there for different bands, you what I’m saying?

Noah: The My Ruin crowd and our crowd is a little bit of a different crowd than the American Head Charge crowd is, you know. We were kind of nervous first walk out but the crowd response was just amazing. We’re only hoping it gets better from here.

Karma: Well best of luck to you on the rest of the tour, judging from last night you may not need it! [We both laugh]

Karma: Interesting time scheduling between the shows there lots of space in betwixt each port. Does that bother you?

Noah: It doesn't bother me but it definitely does more harm than good, for us anyway. I know we had holes on quite a few of the dates and everything. We still don’t know whether or not they’re gonna fall through or whether or not they’re gonna happen. Hopefully, we’ll have most of those dates covered possibly, which is us and Diecast, we are talking about possibly doing those dates on our own.

Noah: With us it’s like a rhythm thing, if we get out of rhythm you’re never as tight after a day off, you know. Sometimes you need a day to rest, unless you’re sick, we don’t like having any down days at all.

Karma: Now seeing it from that angle, I can see how that would throw things off by having a lot of downtime.

Karma: Speaking of touring, it seemed like you guys had a lot of fun on [the Jägermeister Double Shot Of Rock: Part II] tour with My Ruin according to your tour journal on your website….

Noah: They’re just so personal, you know what I mean. So personable, they are great, great people.

Noah: Well we’ve actually been friends with them for years. We’ve been playing with them for almost two years now. We live about forty-five minutes south of them, they’re from LA. We’re kinda couple of the main local draws in the area back there. We’ve been playing shows with them for the past two years, like I said we’ve known them and everything but you spend three months off-and-on on the road with somebody. You get to know them a little better than just playing weekend shows with them.

Noah: We definitely look up to them a lot. We have a lot of respect for them. They can mop a show with almost anybody in a live show; they are incredible live. On a personal level, we’re hanging out with them everyday, when we had off we were caravanning together at all the shows. If there were any problems with vehicles, in which there were a couple of times in which we helped each other out. We went through a lot together on the last tour, both good and bad stuff. It was kinda sad for us because it was our first lengthy tour, you know.

Noah: They were going back to LA, and I know it was kind of hard for them finishing the tour without us. We’re really excited to hang out with them again when we get home.

Noah: It was cool, but we definitely weren’t good enough. [Chuckles] We only had four songs written at the time.

Noah: Yeah. [Bashfulness creeps in his voice] We were lucky to pull off a twenty-minute set, you know. We were just scared little kids you know. [Laughs] I mean we walked up on stage and it was our first show as Bleed The Sky and it was sold-out 950-people.

Noah: Yeah, we were like, “Okay, what the hell do we do now?” I don’t even think we made that good of an impression on anyone at that point but it’s definitely awesome. A lot of people who interview us ask us about that and you know it was timing mainly. Our guitarist at the time, Wayne, had kind of grown up in the hardcore scene there, in Orange County and LA. One of his old bands had basically done the scene and knew all of the promoters and knew all of the people and everything. So that was how we were able to hook that one up.

Noah: Yeah, [chuckles] it was pretty cool. We’d love to get the chance to play with them again and go, “Do you remember when…” and see if they have any idea. We don’t sound the same, all of the songs that we had we’ve changed up. After playing the same stuff for two years, you definitely tighten it up a lot so I don’t even think they’d recognize us.

Karma: In a way that’s a good thing, it’s always good to grow and to get tighter in the process goes without saying.

Karma: Now f0r those that have never seen you, in your words, what would one expect from a Bleed The Sky show?

Noah: A lot of headbangin’! That’s one thing that we’ve always jokingly said to each other, we’re like, “Well I’m not feeling that good tonight.” we’re like, “Okay, just headbang as hard as you can!” So that’s one thing that we really enjoy too, we kind of feed off of each other. We look over and the guy next to you is doing the windmill and everything then you’re like, “Ohhh, now I have to do that one!” And [another] guy sees you doing it and he's like, “Oh, I’ve gotta do that!” It’s like that front to back! All it takes is one-person starts something and we all just try to outdo him, you know. We watch the videos back and you can see the chain of one person starting, within seconds all of us are going, “YEAH!” It’s awesome. We take a lot of pride playing tight. For a while, we were playing all of the stuff we were playing all of the stuff we were playing and our stage show was kind of lacking. We said okay, we’ll look at some of the best musicians in the world. Are they able to go off physically as well as play the stuff they do? We’re like, “God, we’ve got a lot of work to do!” so we physically went into the studio, didn’t turn any fans and we were dripping with sweat. We did that, and did that and did that…it got to the point where anything we could play, we could do whatever we wanted on stage and still be able to play it.

Noah: I mean it’s not like we just walk up and rock out because I’ve seen guys that hairwhip as hard as we do but they can’t play the notes. And I’ve seen guys that play the notes better than we do and can’t hairwhip. Then there are some on the other hand that can do both and to me, those are the most impressive bands. You go and watch a band like Meshuggah and they’re nonstop head-to-the- floor, headbanging! I mean it may not be super fast but just really hard, really consistent front to back. Those guys don’t miss a beat you know!

Noah: And you look at bands like Dillinger Escape Plan, and some of those other bands like that it’s just incredible…those are the kind of bands we look to as far as energy on stage, not necessarily musical taste. Although we do love both those bands but we look at bands like that on an energy level and go, “We have work to do!” We want to be remembered like that! You can’t play perfect every single night but if you watch one little part, I guarantee nobody’s gonna remember if you jumped five feet off your amp. No ones gonna hear one note slip if you’re headbanging faster than anything they’ve ever seen. It’s like one compliments the other; it’s just finding a good medium between the two.

Karma: You guys have a relatively new album out Paradigm in Entropy. How has the response been?

Noah: Well at first, to be honest, it wasn't that good like when the album first dropped [April 19^th]. So many critics that were quick to jump in and call us Chimaira rip-offs, blah, blah, blah. We got that so much that we were like, we’re not seeing it. What is that everybody else is seeing that we’re not? All we could look at is, yeah we do have six members. Yeah, we do have a Sampler you know what I mean. Other than that, there’s not a whole lot of similarities. We’re definitely in the same genre, I mean we kind of looked at that too. Why are we letting these guys get to us when they are saying we ripped off Chimaira when we’re friends with them? But I mean if we were ripping them off, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be friendly to us!

That’s kinda how the review started and then after that, we were like, “Oh great, here we go, we’re just gonna be in their shadow!” you know we look up to them. We have a lot of respect for them but that’s definitely not what we wanted is to be compared that closely to where people couldn’t hear what we were about. But now especially after the touring has started, we released our video for “Minion” and all of this other stuff. It slowly seem like some of the people that were really quick to say that were kind of backpedaling a little bit and they are saying some better things.

Karma: Well that’s good, because I do not think it is fair to you as a band to have a constant veil of comparison of you like that.

Noah: After it’s all said and done, the reviews have gotten a lot better. That’s all positive to me because the new stuff that we’ve been working on is night and day! It’s heavier, harder, faster, more technical than anything we did on the first record.

Noah: Well what it’s looking like and this is nothing definitive, we’ll probably won’t start recording until next August or September possibly. We even talked with our label [Nuclear Blast] and said that we wanted to start recording in the spring. And the way they put it to us was the stuff we’re tired of playing every night, the stuff that’s old to us is still new to almost every city we go to. A lot of these people haven’t heard us yet, a lot of these people haven’t seen us live. So you have to stop doing it before you burn out your crowd but at the same time, we’re just starting, you know what I mean?

Noah: We kinda looked at, took a step back, and said, “They’re right”! We just need to tour the hell out of this record. We’re constantly working on new stuff. If you don’t have new stuff in the bag at all times, it makes it really hard to play the same songs every single night; you don’t have anything else to look forward to. We’re probably not gonna play any of the new stuff on any of this tour. It’s just going to be this record. We’re gonna play everything off this record, hopefully it will be next August [when we start recording] and released next winter.

Karma: How do you feel about Paradigm of Entropy? Do you think it will be an album that will remember for years to come?

Noah: In my opinion, I think it will be remembered as Bleed The Sky’s first record. To me I love it but I don’t listen to it in a big-headed way like, [inflection changes] “Oh my god, my band kicks ass!” but I listen to our record a lot! I put on headphones, I listen to it front to back and I study it more than anything. Kinda like watching the video the day after the football game, you know what I mean. You can see what parts you messed up that way and what can I do better next time. What can we change or how can we work on the guitar tone better. What part of what song makes it better than the rest and things like that. I really listen to it a lot. I’m really trying to prep myself up for what I want to do on the next record. I know the rest of guys are doing the same thing.

Noah: Yeah! Kyle [Moorman] is SICK and tired of hearing it; he never wants to hear our CD again!! [Laughs] Kyle is also more of the technical, sit behind the soundboard. He’ll help edit, help mix, help that…and I just hear it. I listen to it as songs; Kyle hears it in a different way. Some of the guys are just sick and tired of it but I personally love it, you know what I mean! I don’t think we could have done any better on it. I wouldn’t change anything about it. In hope that it will be remembered again, as Bleed The Sky’s first record. In my opinion I think that the next one is gonna put the other one to shame. It’s different as night and day, heavier, harder better on every level. The softer songs are going to be a lot more intricate…if we even decide to do that. Right now, the stuff we’ve been working on is “Division” and a “Borellia” mesh; a lot heavier, a lot more technical stuff like that.

I can’t tell what it’s all gonna be like. We wrote two of the songs off Paradigm in Entropy while we were in the studio recording. It just kind of came out. The title track was one of them and the instrumental “Gated” was another one. Austin and I actually toyed around with “Paradigm in Entropy” but I didn’t have any lyrics written until I got into the studio. We didn’t have a song structure, just the riffs. We just started working all together and then it was just, ‘boom, boom…’ done real quick.

Karma: In other words, was it something a little different, I mean that process was not how you normally write and create songs then.

Noah: Usually not, that was really different for us especially with the instrumental “Gated”. That stuff that we did we sat down with acoustic guitars and jammed. We were like, “Okay, let’s just see how it sounds” and to be honest one of the main reason why we left “Gated” alone as an instrumental was because I hadn’t written any lyrics for it and I hadn’t written any vocal lines for it. It would have taken away from everything else if I would have tried at the last minute to throw stuff in.

The way we usually do it, Kyle will come up with an idea for something and he’d be like, “Yeah come over to my house” because he’s got a studio in his house. So I’ll go over and we’d lay down the guitar tracks and do Pro-Tools and sample the drums over it and structure it, write all of the riffs, you know. Then from there, we usually go to Austin, he rewrites all of the drum stuff to his liking and everything. It’s different for some songs like if you listen to that record, that took us two months to write. Then there are other songs like “Paradigm in Entropy” and it was like ‘boom’ overnight done, “Gated” done! We spent a lot of time on songs like “The Martyr”, “Leverage”…“Minion” we wrote in a day. Every now and again, one of those would just flies out and I know “KillTank” came really quick. Songs like “Borellia” [Mass] we spent a couple of days, we just take it at whatever pace the song wants to be written as, you know what I mean.

Noah: Mhmmm! Absolutely and that was the thing with Paradigm. We were like, “Are we rushing this” and we listened back to it and we were like, “No, that actually sounds really good.” I think if we would have spent more time on we would have ended up butchering it. Tearing it apart and rewriting it, it just would have been as cool on the record. It’s just raw, straightforward…real simple nothing super tricky to it. The way we wrote that song, Austin wrote the drum part first. We heard him playing it in our studio. We walked in one day and he had been in there for about an hour just jamming around before we got there and he was playing that beat. I was like, “Cool, keep playing that beat, I’m gonna try to throw a guitar riff over it” and that’s how that came up. It’s just kind of different with every song, you know. If it takes a month to write song, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be better than one that took two hours. It’s just whatever pace is comfortable, we just kind of go with it.

Noah: It’s probably a tie with me between “The Martyr” and “Borellia Mass”, those are my favorites. “The Martyr” definitely is very personal lyrically to me but on a musical level, I think it’s definitely the most diverse. It’s got some of our heaviest stuff in there, some of our most abrasive vocals, if you want to call it that, it has some of our sacrilegious meanings in that and everything. At the same time with the clean stuff there’s parts in there that has four and five part vocal harmonies. That all kind of goes back to the fact that we’re all Alice In Chains fans since we were in middle school you know.

Noah: On the other hand then there are songs like “Borellia Mass” that are just [filled] with a lot of off timing stuff. The chorus to “Borellia Mass” to be honest we had to go back to our Soundgarden collection.

Noah: We had to listen to all of our Soundgarden stuff we had to make sure it wasn’t a Soundgarden riff. Because the chords are, the way the harmonies, and the chorus of that song and everything; we were like, “Wow, that’s very Soundgarenesque”. We were like, “I like…let’s just remember how we approached this part so maybe we can use the same idea later in another song” or anything like that. To be honest, that’s the reason why there’s only one vocal track on the chorus on “Borellia Mass”, there’s no harmonies, there’s nothing! It’s the only song that doesn’t have any harmonies in it. That was mainly like, “Man if I throw in harmonies over this, it’s gonna take away from the guitar depth”. It’s really chordy, it sounds really simple but the guitar chords are very strange, the harmonies are very strange. I felt like, we all felt like if I did a harmony part over that it would take away from what the guitar was doing.

Karma: Asides from Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, and Meshuggah, whom are some of your other influences?

Noah: I mean, everybody in the band has their different tastes like personally, my favorite Metallica record is the “black” album. You know that’s when I came into Metallica. I couldn’t say I'm an old-school diehard Metallica fan. Even like Slayer and stuff like that. I didn’t really grow up on that. The first real metal I heard was Vulgar Display of Power. So me personally it’s more stuff like that. All of us have common interest in the good grunge bands, you know what I mean?

Noah: Like Nirvana had some good stuff but to all of us, they were the least out of all of the Grunge Era, you know what I mean!

Noah: You have albums like, Superunknown by Soundgarden, Alice In Chains Dirt, Pearl Jam Ten, STP Purple. You’ve got some of the greatest songwriters all coming together within a two-three year period putting out these records that was just blowing everyone’s minds. Then of course, all of us are diehard Pantera fans. The first time we hear the song and all of us would be screaming the lyrics and the next time, tomorrow when we’d listen to that exact same song, we’re all playing the riffs on an air guitar. Next day air drums, you know. [Chuckles] That’s’ one of those bands you could never get tired of listening to because there’s always something tense going on, mainly stuff like that. If you’d look through our CD collection in our van, we have the most random crap you can imagine.

Noah: Yesterday we were listening to Pantera, the day before that Bone Thugs, NWA before that. I made a couple of mix metal CD’s of Arch Enemy, Soilwork, and stuff like that. It’s really weird, we listen to Portishead…

Noah: Yeah, we listen to a lot of stuff for different reasons. We listen to new rap for humor.

Noah: …but we still listen to it and rock out. We know all of the words because it’s just freakin’ hilarious that some of these guys are making as much money as they are saying what they’re saying.

Noah: But then in a respect issue, we’ll go back and listen to Dr. Dre The Chronic and we’ll go back and listen to Cypress Hill Black Sunday and Bone Thugs Creepin’ On A Come Up. It was those old school that made a significant impact, you know. The first Eminen record [The Slim Shady LP] I mean there have been rap albums that have made a huge impact. Our drummer is a diehard, diehard rap fan. It’s really weird, he made a mix CD with the most random crap I’ve ever heard. He puts it in and the first song is “Hammer Smashed Face” by Cannibal, the second song is [inflection changes to a more urban drawl] “Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta” off of the Office Space Soundtrack and the third song is Creedence Clearwater Revival, Darkside of the Moon, 36 Mafia and then Soundgarden. We listen to so much random stuff and I think it’s good…

Noah: We’ve taken ideas…like we listened to the first Bone Thugs [If I Could Teach The World] record and it’s the darkest of all rap albums ever! If you listen to the beats, you listen to the synth stuff in the background. That record just sounds evil, I mean really dark. We’ve taken ideas as we’ve gone, “Whoaaaa, that sounds so brutal! What is that?” and that’s another reason why we listen to bands like Nine Inch Nails. We’ll go, “Why is that so much darker than anything I’ve ever heard? What is it that makes it that way? Is it the vocals, the guitars, the drums, the synth, the sampling stuff, what is it?” We just feed off of it. We have a binder in our band [filled] with nothing but ideas. It's like, "Hey write that down with that song we need to go back and listen to that to try and figure out what that is. Just that sound"! We don't want to steal it but that sound is really cool, so we make a little note. When we have time to go through the binder, we're like "Hey, we've got a day off, let's go listen to these CD's". We'll then try to mess around with some stuff to see what it is. We will list a hundred of people under our influences probably everyone from Primus to Alice In Chains to Dr. Dre. We take ideas…I don't know if you're familiar with our song "Through The Dirt"?

Noah: Oh okay you hadn't heard that one but it was on our demo, our four track EP two years ago. I think you can download it off our website but if you listen to it during the chorus, the rhythm on there was totally influenced by a Bone Thugs song. It's all screaming, it's all brutal, and it's heavy but the rhythm of the vocals is based on a Bone Thugs song that me and Austin always listen to when we're walking around [mimics song]. So I mean we take ideas from everything like that, whatever fits the song, whatever makes it better.

Karma: Okay well switching gears a tad, with you being a frontman yourself who in your opinion exemplifies the role?

Noah: [Dead silence] In my opinion…are you talking about in metal or in general?

Noah: To be honest, I think the best the best metal frontman would have to be Phil Anselmo. The guy can sit down with an acoustic guitar and sing better than most. You listen to songs like "Suicide Note Part II" and he's just destroying it screaming the whole time. In metal, that's one guy I look up to. Even his aura, he walked on stage like he was, not better than everybody but he was the most confident dude you'd ever seen on stage. He walked around with his head up. He's famous for in the middle one of their own songs looking back over at Dimebag while Dime's soloing going [impersonating Phil's voice], "That's badass!" He was so pumped about his band; nobody was better than his band in his eyes. And to me that's the [level of] confidence most people jus do not have!

Phil Collins is one of my favorite singers. We listen to all kinds of stuff. We listen to pop: Michael Jackson, Huey Lewis & The News, Robert Palmer. We're big fans of all of that but in metal it would definitely be a tie between Phil from Pantera and Jens [Kidman] from Meshuggah. Jens is one of those guys too, he never one time just all out headbangs but he walks around with this creepy aura, you know what I mean. Nobody messes with him. He carries himself with such confidence.

Noah: Yeah! Favorite singing of all time, Layne [Staley] and Jerry [Cantrell] from Alice In Chains hands down.

Noah: They were the most creative, they found notes that shouldn't work together an on that same level I hold in the same exact utmost respect is Simon & Garfunkel.

Noah: If you look at some of the stuff those guys did with vocals and they were finding notes and making 'em work that nobody had imagined that could work together. I have a thousand different favorite lead singers in different style, you know.

Karma: If you could commission a band to cover a Bleed The Sky song, who would do it and which song would cover?

Noah: Oh, I don't know if you have enough time for this one! [We both laugh] What song would they do?

Noah: I don't know, Wayne…help me out on this one! [Repeats question to Wayne] One drummer that I would personally like to sit down with and I think he would laugh at how simple it would be for him but Tomas Haake from Meshuggah.

Noah: He's one I would definitely love to have on drums. God, I can't even think. I've never had anybody ever ask me that. That's probably one of the coolest questions anyone has ever asked me in an interview.

Karma: Why thank you! All right, tell you what I'll let you slide on this one, you can come back to it later if you want.

Karma: Speaking of Meshuggah, we were discussing this a little bit last night; please tell me about your obsession with the band. How did it all get started?

Noah: Oh yeah! I personally have a thing for Meshuggah! Anything and everything I can get my hands on that those guys have touched, done…anything like that, you know what I mean! A lot of the bands that are on our label we look at as peers. We're like, "Man, I can't wait to tour with MNEMIC or Soilwork and In Flames". I think we're gonna get along with them great. I think the shows and responses will be killer but Meshuggah's the one band that we're all like, [Awe filling his voice] "Ahhhh"! We're gonna see Meshuggah next week!!" I mean, we're still giddy with those guys. Nobody is better than them! [Excitement builds in his voice] We collect everything! I have four or five Meshuggah picks, posters, every CD they ever put out, bootlegs… I mean all kinds of crazy stuff. All the side projects stuff. And I was telling you about the setlist…

Noah: …one that we had gotten from one of the Meshuggah shows that Kyle grabbed off the stage no knowing that they had two more songs hoping that they knew what their encore songs were. He grabbed it and it had Thordendal's boot print on it. We were like, "Oh, that's sooo cool!" Anytime we go to a show and we see a flyer for Meshuggah, November 30^th or whatever. We're tearing it off the wall real quick and run and hide it, you know what I mean! [We both laugh] That's one of those bands I think we'd get along with but it would be so damn intimidating to play a show with them on our end. How do you 1. prepare an audience for a band like that 2. How can you ever follow a band like that, you know what I mean?

Noah: God Forbid, there's no way I would ever, ever…I don't care how big we EVER got, to play after Meshuggah on ANY night! That band should close out every show they play for the rest of their lives! NOBODY can hold up to following a show like that. [We both chuckle]

Karma: Nicknames your friends would give you on the fly, off the tops of their heads?

Noah: Grandpa, I'm the oldest in the group! Sometimes they tease me. To be honest with you most of the other nicknames are probably too vulgar to be released.

Karma: Have it your way! [Laughter ensues] What’s the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning?

Noah: Well when we're on tour the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning is, "Ahhh, we're on tour!" [Laughs] I wake up with a big smile. Any other day, I wake up and go, "Ahhh, I wish we were on tour!"

Noah: If we were a cocktail, we'd definitely be an Audio M F'er. A little bit of everything in there, it will put you on you back after a few minutes.

Karma: Well there you go! Role reversal, if you could interview a band, name one that you would like to know more about.

Noah: Meshuggah! Definitely, without question!! Just to be able to sit and try to understand a little bit about them, as impossible as it might seem.

Noah Robinson of Bleed The Sky (Photo: Erika Kristen Watt)

Noah: Knowing that you like our stuff and what we do, what would you add as a suggestion to us, completely open minded, to improve what you saw live?

Karma: To be honest, I loved the energy. I too am very impressed with a band that can do windmills that can still play, sing, and not fuck anything up.

Karma: Now that rocks and takes a lot of talent and time to be able to accomplish. As oppose to showboatin' with big signs saying, "Oh look what I can do!" I think your live show is very tight. Grant it, this was my first time seeing you but I cannot make comparison…but from what I witnessed, I don't think there's really much for you to change. You gel very well as a group both on and off stage, and I'd say run with that!!

Noah: Awesome! Well I'll ask you the same thing after you've been to two, three, or a dozen more of our shows!

Karma: There you go!! [We both laugh] Well thank you so very much Noah, it's been a pleasure!

I'd like to thank Noah for being so awesome and to Loana dP Valencia at Nuclear Blast for setting the interview up.