Interview mit Ad Nauseam

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With „Imperative Imperceptible Impulse“ AD NAUSEAM have undoubtedly released one of the most complex, brutal and multi-layered extreme metal albums of the year. How the Italians have developed their own unique musical language, why they have put an insane amount of preparatory work into their second album, for what reason they deliberately do not completely exhaust their technical skills and what ties Emperor and Sunn O))) to classical music and Igor Stravinsky to metal, the band explains in the following interview.

Italy was hit particularly hard by the corona virus at the beginning of the pandemic and musicians often still have a hard time under the current circumstances. How do you deal with this difficult situation?
Like in every part of the world, concerts have been largely prohibited during the last twelve months. That’s a huge problem for professional musicians and artists in general.
Many locals, including some well known and established ones, have been forced to close due to financial problems caused by these restrictions.
We’re facing this situation working at home and sharing any idea with the other band members online.

According to your label, you are big perfectionists when it comes to your music. Is your extremely detailed approach the background of your band name or did you choose your name AD NAUSEAM for another reason?
The name was chosen because it reflects several music related aspects, from our need to search for perfection (in terms of songwriting, sound, layout etc.) „until nausea“ to the atmosphere that our music creates.
Contrary to rumors you may have read somewhere, it’s not a homage to an Ulcerate song. In fact, the idea came while reading a Napalm Death tracklist.

Your music seems to be very complex from a technical standpoint. When did you start learning to play an instrument and how did you eventually manage to acquire your current skills?
We all started playing our instruments around 20 years ago. Most of our techniques have been developed in early years, when we all had more time to dedicate to practice. In the last years we concentrated particularly on odd time signatures and we became familiar with them.

However, complex music is not necessarily better than simple music. What is it that draws you to technically challenging compositions?
It’s our natural way to compose that leads us to develop some technical skills and push us to do something different every time.
We agree with you when you say that it’s not the technical level that upholds if some music is good or not. Our music is technical, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t like simple or even minimal music.
In the transition period from Death Heaven to AD NAUSEAM, we wrote songs enough for a whole album where speed and high technical profile were too predominant. We felt that kind of music was less emotional and that’s the reason why we scrapped most of it and started to write music in a different manner, with more focus on the atmosphere and the feelings.
Now we feel free to play everything that gives us strong emotions, regardless of it being very complex or, on the contrary, very minimalist.

Did you ever reach a point you just couldn’t get past any further with your skills?
No, not by now. With black/death metal being a kind of music that requires high energy and preparation at a physical level, it’s pretty normal that there will be a limit a musician can’t overstep. To us limits are just boundaries to overcome with new musical solutions. They represent goals that allow us to grow as composers and musicians. We hope that the experience and the will to experiment with new solutions will help us to find new ways to improve ourselves.

As far as I know, you are strongly inspired by classical music. Why did you as an artist nevertheless not go into traditional classical music, but rather in the direction of extreme metal?
We met each other and started playing together in our first band because we were deeply into extreme metal music and our dream was to play in a metal band. For most of us, listening to modern classical music started decades after we entered the realm of metal, so it’s obvious we started playing metal instead of any other genres. Black/death metal is still our driving force; maybe our approach is different from other bands that play this genre. Finally, only one quarter of AD NAUSEAM’s members can play classical instruments.

Do you see similarities between classical music and extreme metal?
Yes, a lot, but of course it depends a lot on the composer or band you are referring to.
For example, bands like Nero di Marte and Gorrch share a common ground with modern classical music. In bands like Emperor there are many similarities with the post-romantic classical period, in bands like Sunn O))) you can hear the pionieering work of the great mind of Giacinto Scelsi.
On top of that there are many classical music pieces that seem to have anticipated any extreme metal avant-garde movement. Take Shostakovich’s Quartets number 8 and 9, Stravinsky’s „Rite Of Spring“, Bartók’s „The Miraculous Mandarin Suite“. You’ll find the intensity, the dark atmospheres, the harmonic and rhythmic intricacies that you can find in any well crafted, non-basic extreme metal album.

Your new album „Imperceptible Imperativere Impulse“ is said to be more polished than your debut released six years earlier. What did you do differently this time?
Well, if you refer to the sound, that’s because we spent thousands of hours studying, experimenting, carring out tests, manufacturing the equipment we needed and expanding the number of amps and stomp boxes we could use to get a clear, natural yet aggressive sound. Both albums are self-produced, but we had gained a lot of experience since the recording of „Nihil Quam Vaquitas Ordinatum Est“ and that’s the reason why you can hear a big improvement in terms of sound and production on our second full-length.
If you refer to composition, this album has been crafted in a different way, the music flow here is much more a continuous transformation than a compilation of riffs. It has been a huge work, songs have been manipulated, modified, assembled and disassembled for years before we felt satisfied with their shape.

„Imperative Imperceptible Impulse“ is a pretty cryptic title. What’s the thought behind it?
The fact it’s cryptic is because the lyrics are inspired by our deep unconscious, especially during the hardest and most difficult moments of our existence. Like our music there is no clear reference point, and at the same time there are many. Lyrics are just keys that can open many doors deep inside yourself. You are still in charge of choosing what door to step into. „Imperative Imperceptible Impulse“ is just a title that elegantly and beautifully sums up this concept (and many others!).

Also, the interesting artwork by Vama Marga has very abstract quality to it. What can you tell us about it?
We knew his work and we liked his style a lot. We asked him if he would be interested to do a cover artwork for us and he agreed. We sent him a couple of pre-production tracks and gave him complete freedom. When we got the first sketches, he described the subject as half a place and half a presence. As he painted while listening to our music the painting came out very representative of our music style.
Needless to say we have been honoured to work with such a gifted artist.

In the description of the album on Bandcamp it says that you attempted to form disharmonies into harmonies and dissonances into melodies on it. Can you explain this approach with a concrete example?
We try to incorporate deviations from the standard way to compose, a lot of unnatural combinations of chords, beats and tempos, but at the same time we feel our music has melodies and flows easily. In fact, to our ears our music doesn’t sound dissonant at all. It’s all a matter of being used to different musical conventions or not. If you raise a child with Schoemberg music, that musical paradigm will become the melodic dictionary of the child. If you have been raised listening to the radio you will have a lot to work to do to train your brain to decode this musical language.

As far as I understood correctly, you even tuned your instruments in an unusual way. What’s that all about?
We started to experiment with unconventional tunings around 2014 and then we developed our own particular one that makes it easier to play uncommon harmonies and allows us to play chords that are impossible to produce with standard tunings.
It’s like using a different language: When we introduced that tuning, suddently we had a completely renewed vocabulary at our disposal to write music, and months after months we started to master it adequately. Five out of six songs on „Imperative Imperceptible Impulse“ have been written with that unconventional tuning.

You also used a violin on the record, but only in a few places. Why do you refrain from giving more space to this instrument in your sound?
Our music is composed starting from our electric instruments, while violins, piano and any other instrument come at the last stage of the album making.
In our first album we used orchestration made of recorded violins in some interlude and on a solo too (on „Key To Timeless Laws“), instead of the electric guitar. Similarly this album’s orchestral parts have been used as sonic glue that holds energy, amplifies atmospheres and prepares the listener for the real deal. In our opinion the violins have just the space they need to have, no more, no less. Moreover in some parts there is something around sixty violins layered together, so it’s easy to understand that we can’t recreate such music in a live context as we are against the use of recorded tracks and samples. That’s not a problem as we engineer our gigs to be another representation of the same music, a more „alive“ and interactive version. We have been told many times that the live version of our music is a step above the recorded one.

In the description of the album it also says that you approach production similar to classical music according to the mantra „less is more“. How is that to be understood?
Our goal is to capture the sound of the instrument, not to characterize it in the post-production. We want the sound to be natural and pure, we want to be able to add the minimum in the mixing and mastering. We feel that’s the better way to get a personal and faithful sound, which is something that seems to be pretty rare among metal bands these days.

So you paid special attention to the quality of the recording in order to have to rework it as little as possible. How did you manage that?
Correct. It’s somewhat like in photography. If you want a flashy, colorful picture that attracts the eye (but looks somehow false, not real) you can take a mediocre picture and then process it hard digitally. On the other hand, usually great pictures are made by calibrating every aspect before taking it, so it will need only little tweaks to be perfect. Our favourite approach is the second one.
We dedicated a ridiculous amount of time to calibrate the way to capture the sound from the instrument rather than spend efforts in the mixing phase. We took care of every aspect that can have an influence on the sound, from the most obvious ones to some less expected ones. We experienced numerous combinations of microphones-cables-mic preamp-guitar/bass preamps-power amps-cabinets, placed the microphones at different locations and orientations and studied how the response changed. About the drums we studied in detail how to place it in a correct psychoacoustic environment, each of the 18 microphones we used to capture it was in that position for a reason. Furthermore, we realized a significant part of the equipment used to record and mix the album on our own: a microphone built using headphones transducer, stringed instruments preamps and stompboxes, cabinets, snares and kick drums, compressors, summers, equalizers, cables and so on. A lot of cool stuff. The nice thing is the better you capture the sound, the less you have to use those tools and the better those small alterations will sound.

In some genres, such as post-rock, a lot of work is done with effects, so the production plays an important role. Don’t you think that there’s also some merit to placing a lot of emphasis on post-production and thus making the production itself practically an instrument?
Yes, but that’s definitely not our goal. Our goal is to make a real listening experience, to molest the listener by placing him in the middle of our room. For this reason the effects we used have been captured while recording, they come straight out of the speaker cabinet. Of course, we did many tests and we selected them carefully in the context of the mix.

Due to the pandemic, it is hardly possible to plan safely at the moment, especially no concerts. Will you be working on new music soon instead?
Yes, sure. We’ve some songs in the making, one of them comes from the very first period after the „Nihil Quam Vaquitas Ordinatum Est“ compositions (around 2013) and has been revolutionised several times. Of course, it’s impossible to have a real vision of how the music sounds if you don’t play it in your rehearsal place with the rest of the band members, but we’re trying to get the best we can in this situation.
We’re also scheduling some gigs for the end of 2021 and/or beginning of 2022, if it will be possible to play live.

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