Interview Tomas Haake Meshuggah

Lineup: Jens Kidman - Vocals Fredrik Thordendal - Guitar Mårten Hagström - Guitar Dick Lövgren - Bass Tomas Haake - Drums

Fall Of The Fury Tour God Forbid Meshuggah The Haunted MNEMIC 10/23/05 El Corazon (Seattle, WA) Interviewer: Alexi Front

"I can’t see fans of everything liking us. If your favorite band is Kreator, you will probably not like us. You have to be someone who is open minded and interested in new ways of writing music and thinking."

When it comes to defying genre’s and pushing the boundaries of metal, no name should be more prevalent in a metal fans’ head than Meshuggah. Since the band’s inception over fifteen years ago, each release has brought fourth a new journey to the listener. The band’s last two releases, the I EP and Catch 33, prove to be by far the most interesting releases. The two songs add up to over an hour of music. Despite the band's clear stray from conventional recording processes and music writing, the band has managed to gain a larger audience than ever before.

Alexi Front:  First off, this is the first tour you are doing in the states in support of Catch 33.  How has the response been to the album in terms of the audience?

Tomas Haake:  It is hard to say.  We have not been here touring, till now in the States.  All the reviews are going really well.  They are better on average then the past albums.  We have not seen any really bad reviews of it.  As far as that goes it has been really good.  It is hard to say, as we have not been touring for this album for too long.  People are digging it no doubt.  For what it is, people are understanding what Catch 33 is.  It wasn’t written for live intentions.  But now we do some shows for it, and we do part of it, like ten minutes of it, and it works as live material.  It would be almost impossible to play the whole thing.  It is too much to learn.

Alexi: How has the European response?

Tomas: Well there are always differences. All bands have different markets: you are not going to get the same review in Dallas that you will in New York.   

Alexi: How do you play the songs of Catch 33 live?

Tomas: Well the album is one song; it is just divided up into several songs, or chapters.  But it is one continuous piece of music.  For me it seems strange to talk of it as songs.  We play a part that starts as a sample from the album that is played from the front of the house, then we play about ten minutes of the album.  It is not a mix of different parts of the album; it is just one stretch of the album.  It goes from the middle of the album for ten minutes.

Alexi: Essentially, Catch 33 is a continuation of the I EP and follows the same concept.  How did the recording process work?

Tomas: We started to write for the Catch 33 record, and what we had written in the beginning was going to be the I EP which was going to be released on Fractured Transmitter, which would later release the I EP.  WE lost track of what we wanted to do after a month of recording.  We were also recording with live drums.  We weren’t feeling it and we started over.  We did a totally different thing and that became the I EP which was released on Fractured Transmitter.  After that, we immediately started writing for the Catch 33 record.  It took quite a lot of time.  The I EP was just going to a collection of material we were jamming on put together after a week.  It was meant to be more of a funny side thing.  But then, as usual, once we got into it and started feeling it and fooling around with it.  It must have been four or five months to finish the I EP.  Then Catch 33 took about eight or nine months.  Even though we have been away from the states and away from touring we have been busy.

Alexi: How did the creative process for Meshuggah change over time?  It is a drastic change to go from eight or nine songs on a CD to one conceptual song.  How does that process come about and how do the transformations take place?

Tomas: In a lot of ways, I’d say that all of our releases until Nothing, everything was written separately.  I would co-write with Martin or Frederick, Martin would write with Frederick or by himself, Jens would write by himself, and we would bring stuff together, most of which would be complete songs.  For Catch 33 and I were both a full band efforts.  With the I EP, Frederick and I went to a jam room and we would must play.  When we would find something we liked, like a pattern or a riff, on the drums, we would do takes of ten to fifteen minutes of me playing that part.  Since we jammed them I would stray from the pattern and keep going.  We would take a chunk of that and add it to the next part.  That is how the I EP came to be extremely random.  For us, it is almost impossible to learn it, because everything is so random.  When we had record the guitars and bass, we had to draw schematics for the whole thing.  Not notations, but simple guides to where all the hits where because it was all random.  There is not a pattern or anything.  That was also why it took so long to record it.

Onto the Catch 33 release, because we programmed all the drums, it was basically all four of us in an office space around one computer and we had a Line 6 Vetta Head plugged into the PC through a soundcard, and that is how we made the whole album.  The only things we added in the studio were the vocals.  Apart from that, Catch 33 was us four guys sitting around a computer.  Everyone was involved in all the guitar parts and all the drum parts.  Even though Martin and I wrote the lyrics, everyone was involved in putting the lyrics to the music.  That is a big aspect of the record.  When you write music like this, you need to get the vocals to flow with it, but still have it connect to the rhythmic pattern.  It is difficult.

Alexi: Is there a vocal/lyrical theme?

Tomas: Basically, the title and the image, the cover art suggest that it is a paradoxes.  It is not a theme in that sense.  It just that, if you look into lyrics, you find that everything is paradoxical within the lyrics. 

Alexi: So there is a contradiction and paradox within the music and the recording process and the lyrics!

Tomas: It is very much so!  Everything is paradoxical!  We really ended up breaking up a taboo within this genre.  It is taboo to have programmed drums, especially a band like us, were the drums have always been prominent.  It really throws a lot of people off: but it is one of those things we wanted to do.  We noticed the programmed drums worked really well with the idea of having a guitar driven album.  The programmed drums sound a bit like a real drummer, they are emotionless and turned out really well.

Alexi: What did Nuclear Blast think about this concept when you brought it up?

Tomas: They were surprised to hear that we did not want to use live drums.  Other than that they didn’t have much to say.  They don’t usually have much to say about what we do, they don’t question us.  We have been doing this for fifteen years, so I guess they like what we do, and this is just the way we want it.  We wouldn’t let anyone have a hand in our music.

Alexi: Tell me now a bit about the 8-string guitars.  When did this idea first come about?  What was it like first playing these things?

Tomas: We have used the seven string guitars since they first came out, since ’91 or ’92.  We did not use them on first album, but from None and on we used seven string guitars.  This guy in Sweden said he could build us a guitar with as many strings as we wanted.  We thought a bit about experimenting with an additional low string.  Once, we started using the eight string guitars, there was a lot of inspiration within the instrument, because we found we can write new things in a different way.  They are not suited for playing power chords on the lower strings, but for single string riffs, it is unique to go way down like that.  It was a really cool thing!

Alexi: So there was a creative rejuvenation with these new guitars?

Tomas: That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it certainly helped us find new ways to write in our style of music.

Alexi: Now I also read that the band was under a lot of stress during the Nothing sessions.  Tell me a bit about that and the all-nighters.

Tomas: Basically, we didn’t have our studio, so we booked studio time at Daniel Bergstrand’s studio, which was a bit far away from Stockholm.  Early on in the recording we got the offer to do Ozzfest, and that is what put pressure on us.  The whole album, especially the production, suffered from us having to rush everything.  To give you a hint of the differences, for Chaosphere we used ten weeks for the vocals.  For Nothing, we used seven days for the vocals.  We had him scream, and that was that.  We used up maybe eight days for drum recording, seven days for vocals and a week for guitars and bass.  Basically we mixed an album and literally as soon as the mix was done, we got into a cab and went to a mastering place and Frederick basically fell asleep while mastering, he was up for fifty hours.  The next morning we flew to the states.  It was really stupid, we would have taken another two months for the album had we not done the Ozzfest.  That is what put the pressure on us.    

Alexi: When someone says Meshuggah is a technical band, sometimes that comes with a sort of negative connotation that the music is hard to get into.  Do you think that because of the style of music you play it is hard for some people to get into?

Tomas: I can’t really see that.  People can be deterred but, you either like it or you don’t.  I can’t see fans of everything liking us.  If your favorite band is Kreator, you will probably not like us.  You have to be someone who is open minded and interested in new ways of writing music and thinking.  If you are a super fan of old school thrash metal you are probably not gonna like it, you are probably not gonna like us.

Alexi: On the flip side some people including Rolling Stone magazine have placed Meshuggah high on the metal mantel piece.  How do you take this praise?  How do you respond to people when they saw Meshuggah is the best band ever?

Tomas: We don’t respond at all.  It is flattering I guess.  We try not to put much sway into something like that.  It seems like people write us up and think we are cool just because we are different and they think it is cool to like Meshuggah, so they force themselves to like it.  In all honesty, out of a hundred reviewers that write us up as a crazy band that everyone should know about, I don’t think half of them are even into it.  We don’t take notice to those things.

Alexi: Are you going to go back to conventional recording processes for the next album?

Tomas: Yeah, we are gonna go back.  Catch 33 and I are not meant for live us and we need some more live material.  We plan to go back to basic song structures.  No more continuous song structures.

Alexi: What are you going to bring back to the creative process from Catch 33 and I?

Tomas: We are going to bring a lot actually.  We bring renewed inspiration as far as studio work.  We have now found there are so many new ways to record an album and to write one.  This will help us for the next album.  Myself, I wouldn’t be surprised if almost all the material were written by the whole band.  If not, at least more than the past albums.  We will do more things together as a band, but it will not be a Catch 33 or something like that.  It will be more in your face. 

Alexi: Now from what I understand your recording contract with NB USA is up.  Are you entertaining other offers or will you stick with Nuclear Blast for another three albums?

Tomas: Yes, we are re-signing with Nuclear Blast.  We have a much better deal than other places.  We had a few other offers but they could not match Nuclear Blast.  Over the last five years, things have been getting better and better.  We feel good about it!

Alexi Front (alexi@pivotalrage.com)

We'd like to thank Alexi for submitting this article, to Hannah Raymond at Nuclear Blast, and to the Meshuggah camp as well.