Tomas Haake (Meshuggah)
February 2008
On your previous studio recording you used the Drumkit from Hell. How do you see that from three years' time, was it the right decision to go with that?
Yeah. Actually for what we wanted with that album and for a lot of reasons and circumstances we kinda had to do it that way. That very project was very different from anything that we've ever done. Usually we have all of our songs pre-written and rehearsed before we start recording. I practice the songs from six to ten months prior to recording. But for that one we didn't have anything until we actually went into the studio and kind of wrote everything as we went and I didn't have any practising before that. We just kinda wrote that whole song as a whole band and it was a project of like two and half hours out of which the 47 minutes were like the last thing that we did. We narrowed it down to 47 minutes. It was a huge amount of different riffs and different drum parts and it would have been more or less impossible to learn it all just for the sheer amount of different stuff we had on there. At least it would have taken a lot of time and also we know this pretty early on writing and recording that album, that the drum sounded and worked very well for what we wanted with that track because we definitely see Catch 33 as one track. That's what it is basically. We really felt that the Drumkit from Hell stuff suited the album perfectly. Also it's such a taboo to openly admit using programmed drums. We know shitload of bands that actually do use programmed drums but they would never say it so openly in public just because for some reason in the hard rock and metal genres, and especially in a band that's very rhythmically driven like we are where the drums have always been a big part of the sound, it's such a taboo to do that. And for that reason also you just feel like, "Why the hell not? Let's just do it."
That's true. Most fans think it's uncool to use programmed drums...
Yeah, yeah. I don't know why people think that. I mean we don't see things the same way as the average Joe guy because we definitely see it as... it's not a matter of like the tools you use to get to a certain place, it's all about the final result. I couldn't care less if a band uses samples for their guitars or if they use pre-recorded or programmed drums or whatever. It doesn't matter. I cannot care less about anything, it's all about the final result to me, how does it sound and what's the output and what kind of music is this. Is it good or not? It's not a matter of how they got there.
Btw, what kind of feedback did Catch 33 receive from the Meshuggah fans?
Initially I think a lot of people were perplexed by that release and a lot of fans didn't quite know what to think. Like half our fanbase, they immediately loved it and half the fanbase completely hated it. It's kinda the same thing with each album... at least as far as the fans that you can actually see how they respond and react to the stuff, like people on discussion forums... they usually are very divéded in to halves. It was the same thing for the Nothing album, same thing even back for the Chaosphere album, even though!the online response wasn't that big back then. And now we get the same thing with our new album. People like they go either way initially and it was the same thing with Catch 33 as well. If you check back 6-8 months later, a lot more other people actually get the idea that we weòe trying to put across and a lot bigger percentage are actually into that album. So it seems that it does demand some from the listener as well and it takes some time to fully appreciate it.
You are considered to be part of the Drumkit from Hell development team. How much are you involved?
Actually that's kind of a misperception there because I'm not really involved in the Toontrack and Drumkit from Hell stuff that much. I mean I've been on recordings and hit the drums and cymbals for the samples but it's actually Fredrik (Fredrik Thordendal) who's more heavily involved in the company as such.
What drummers would you like to get sampled on this?
Actually to me it doesn't matter. We never use loops in any way so it doesn't matter really who hits the drums as long as you get proper hits and it's properly recorded. You wouldn't really notice any difference.
What do you think about some of the other albums that were made by using Drumkit from Hell?
There's been a shitload of stuff that have used these samples and not only my drumkit samples. Nowadays Toontrack incorporates so much from every style all across the board. Nowadays you can hear it on anything from R&B recordings in the States to death metal in Russia. It's all cool. It's a very good product, it's the leading one in the world right now as far as drum sound library.
Late October 2006 saw the reissue of Nothing. The reason for the bad sound of the original is well known. How do you see it today: wouldn't have been better to wait until you get the proper guitars to record the album in 2002?
Well, it wasn't just the matter of that. The actual recordings started later than we initially hoped it would and we had accepted the offer for the Ozzfest tour in the summer of 2002 and that tour runs for like 10 weeks. We just felt that we had to get the album done before that tour otherwise the album wouldn't be released until maybe like 2003 and we didn't want that to happen so we really hurried the whole production and the whole mixing and recording aspect of that album. So it wasn't just the matter of waiting for the proper guitars even though the very guitar that we recorded on the Nothing album really wasn't that great. It kept detuning the whole times so for each take they had to re-tune the whole guitar, so it was a nightmare of course. But it was mainly the fact that we accepted the Ozzfest tour and we had to leave for that one and that kind of made the production suffer for that album.
When did you decide to re-record that album?
It wasn't really so much a matter of a decision from us as a band. It was actually Fredrik who wanted just to re-record the guitars for our sake and not to be released. When he started doing that it was mainly just for our own sake to kind of hear the songs with the type of sound we really wanted to have on there even initially. So he started re-recording some of the guitars and remixing it and just on talking over the phone to one of the guys from Nuclear Blast I told him that Fredrik what was doing and he seemed to be interested in hearing and maybe releasing that. So that wasn't really our intention when we started doing that but we ended up releasing it with a DVD material. Actually I wasn't even in the studio myself. It was all Fredrik who kind of re-did that. It's not like we re-recorded the whole album, it was just him sitting in the control room and re-recording the guitar sound and adjusted the other sounds to it.
Well, let's see obZen... Was it obvious that you would use real drums on the new album?
Yeah. The only thing we knew for this album when we started writing was basically that we're gonna write a live related album with material we can more easily fit into the live setting, with more normal song structures. When we wrote Catch 33 we didn't even write it to play it live, we never really intended to play it live and that was also one of the other reasons we went with Drumkit from Hell. For this one we intended to do a lot of this stuff life that's why I played live drums this time.
When did you start working on the album and how long it took overall?
We started writing for obZen a year and half ago or maybe a bit more. That's when the first few riffs and half songs kind of came out and we started listening to each other's ideas. But I would say that the better part of the album was written in between New Years and May 2007. The bigger portion of the album was written during that time but one third of the album was written before as well. And we started recording in May. We started tracking drums and we kept doing the work through the summer of 2007 and we finished it up in October. So we spent like 6 months in the studio for this one. But we had a month off from the studio when we did some European festivals.
You mentioned that you wanted to have a live sound on this album but did you have any other ideas as far as the musical direction would go?
We really try for each album not to put up too many guidelines or frames as far as what we wanted to sound like. The only thing we really discussed and we all felt we wanted for this album was that we wanted each song to be very unique and different from all the other ones on the album, so that every song had a very strong individual vibe to it. And in doing that we were hoping to get a very diverse album both as far as tempos, and also as far as the actual vibe of each track. I'm very happy of how it came out.
I've read some opinions of die-hard Meshuggah fans saying obZen is more accessible than some of your previous albums. How do you see that?
I can see what they mean. I agree and I don't agree. In a lot of ways you have a more direct sound and the some of the songs comes out a bit more direct to the listener, so in that sense I can definitely appreciate it and in that sense it is more direct and I think it's easier maybe for the average guy to kind of get into the new album a bit faster than some of the previous stuff, no doubt. But then again, some things that kind of hidden in the music is the fact that this album is definitely the hardest one to play. And in a lot of ways it's the most difficult album as far as for us instrumentalists. But it doesn't really shine through like that and that's a cool thing too. We don't write music for to sound tricky or difficult, we write it to sound cool. And if it is really tricky or difficult to record and to learn the stuff that's just a challenge that we have to overcome.
Being the lyricist of the band, was it you coming up with the album's title obZen?
Yeah, it's basically a play of words between Obscene and Zen as in Buddhism. There's no religious motive behind it, it's just a matter of using a metaphor to get the idea more strongly across.
The figure on the cover goes hand in hand with the motive...
Oh yeah, totally. In a lot of ways. I think the lyrical content of the album, even though it's not really a concept album, but there's a theme that runs through the lyrics that kind of ties in with the artwork and all that as well.
Would you go deeper about the lyrics?
I prefer not to really dig into that too much. I don't think that our lyrics are really that hard to grasp this time around. It's just that most people haven't seen the lyrics yet but as soon as the album is out they'll find out. It's pretty similar to... I'd say in the vibe of the lyrics it's kind of close to the Nothing lyrics.
What would be your favourite song lyrically and musically off obZen?
It's really hard. I never really have like a favourite song of any album that is our own music. To me, especially now with the new album, it's like every song has different stuff that is cool to me. When I listen to the stuff I usually don't think too much about the very lyrics for a certain song even though I do that when I write it. If you say only the music I'd say "Bleed" is one of my favourites and also "Electric Red" and "Pravus". Those are the three tracks that I really like.
I know that lyrics are very important for you but how about the average fan that doesn't care about it, saying you can't understand it anyway?
(Laughs) Yeah, there are people like that. I don't agree with that but of course people's tastes are different when it comes to lyrics as well. We do get a lot of feedback of our lyrics as well and there's definitely a lot of people that dig that aspect of the band as well. Of course you can never write lyrics and kind of make everyone happy. To me it's just a matter of... I never really like lyrics myself that are too obvious and that are just kind of the standard thing. I don't really get that. It's not interesting to me. So many bands just fill their tracks with lyrics because you have to have lyrics there, there's no deeper meaning in that... sometimes I feel like that about lyrics when I see lyrics of some certain bands. It's like, "Okay, this is the same bullshit that everyone else put in their lyrics." I just try to do something different and I try to do something that goes in line with the music that is challenging just as the music is. To me it wouldn't make sense for a band like us to write about stupid everyday standard lyrics bullshit, it wouldn't really fit the music I think. Our music is pretty complex and it has several layers of stuff that you can find in there and it's usually very worth through every track. And then to just write something down on a piece of paper and say, "Yeah, scream this in the microphone", for me it would take away so much of the whole impact of the band. It's not just about the music, it's about the whole package.
There are some fans of technical metal that aren't into Meshuggah only because of the harsh vocals. Every tried using clean vocals?
Not really. It was more clean like in the early years but that was just a matter of what Jens' voice sounded like back then and what we wanted for that time. And nowadays we don't really into that. For all the parts where we use vocals it's pretty much full on. And I think all of us in the band, we really hate the type of vocals that goes back and forth from clean vocals to screaming and stuff like that. There's shitloads of bands that do that nowadays like so called death metal bands. Even like the Gothenburg sound, some of the bands have clean vocals on one part and then it's like growling, then they go back to clean vocals... I just hate that stuff. It gives me the shivers, man! So no, we never really thought of that.
What are your touring plans with obZen?
We start with the Ministry tour in the US for like 8 weeks starting in late March. Then we come home in mid May and we are home for a few weeks and then we do some European festivals during the summer all the way through the end of August. After that one we still don't know what we're doing first. We're aiming at doing a European headlining tour during the fall but we're also going to Japan and Australia and stuff like that and we still don't know which comes first yet.
Last year you did a last minute gig in Budapest. How do you remember that day?
It was really cool. We actually sold the place out and it was just announced the day beforehand, so we were really excited about that. It was a really good show. Actually the reason why we did that was that a few of our crew members like my drum tech and our tour manager, they knew the guy from that place from before because they've been there with other bands playing. They called him up that we were driving through with Meshuggah on our way to Serbia and they just wanted to see if he's available to grab a beer or something. And he asked us if we had a day off or not and when we said yes, he suggested that we come there and play. We just accepted it right over the phone and half an hour later it was online and a lot of people showed up, so it was a really good show.
And you've been to Hungary before... on the boat.
Yeah, that was also a great gig. We had a really good crowd there and it was an awesome time for us. It was a good night, it was pretty packed. I have all good memories from that one too. That was the first time I played on a boat. I never did before and I never did since. I loved it moving when people jumped up and down.