Dead Rhetoric: What tracks seemed to go through the most transformation from their original incarnation to the final rendition this time around?
Zappa: “Beneath the Surface” 100%.
Bacher: I’m going to say “Under Siege”.
Zappa: I had recently gone through a lot of our early demos, even us jamming on different songs- and that song went through everything from the left to the right.
Ehramijan: When we went to start recording “Under Siege”, we were using MIDI backing tracks for Matt’s drums. We realized we didn’t even really know what we were trying to play at that point- we spent an entire session re-writing the drum parts to what we were actually playing. That was an interesting experience.
Goyer: If you guys remember, the difficult labor that was “Shadows”. It wasn’t a difficult song to write, we just seemed a little uncertain about it. We weren’t sure where it was going to go and what it was trying to do. We didn’t have a solid feeling about it, but we knew we had something. Holding on, trying new things- we finally figured it out.
Zappa: You are definitely right Steph about that. I remember while writing that song, just jamming and you ended up coming up with that closing guitar riff, the one that keeps looping over and over again. I remember stopping the jam and saying ‘that’s the riff’.
Goyer: There were points where we wanted to give up on that song, but we knew that we couldn’t. It got there, even though it took us some time.
Dead Rhetoric: As far as the lyrics and vocals, is that something that is collaborative process as a band- and what types of topics do you like to explore?
Bacher: On this one, I wrote the lyrics myself- all the music things we do together. I’ll come in with vocal line ideas and we’ll see if everyone likes them or if they have suggestions for something else. Lyrically, I don’t know if there are particular topics I focus on. I tried really hard on this one, because I have a tendency to write hard to decipher lyrics with a lot of metaphors. I wanted this to be clearer and acute than what we’ve done in the past- I hope it comes off that way even though it’s a lot of personal stuff.
Dead Rhetoric: Why did you seek out Jens and André from Fascination Street Studios in Sweden for the mixing/mastering – what bands/albums that they’ve worked on made the right impression for the duo to work with Protean Collective?
Zappa: All of them! (laughs)
Bacher: That’s honest too. We also worked with them on The Red and The Grey, and they worked so well on that we needed to use them again. The reason we ended up going there, I think Steph and I were thinking about what our process was going to be for The Red and The Grey– so we went through a bunch of albums that we thought about that sounded awesome, see what was involved with them- and almost all of them had some part of Jens in there. We reached out, they do such amazing things.
Goyer: It was really important to me that we achieved a very full, punchy, in your face drum sound but still maintain dynamics. Matt is an insanely talented, dynamic player. So many engineers would have lost that in the process, I am a fan of Dirk from Soilwork who is now in Megadeth- Jens did some of those Soilwork albums. You can hear every ghost note, you can hear every nuance in the drums and yet they still punch you in the face. I knew that if we didn’t get someone who could mix like that, so much of Matt’s style would be lost and it’s a big part of our music.
Zappa: Echoing what these guys have said, everything I have loved has come out of there – Leprous, Symphony X, Soilwork – it’s been all coming out of there. I’m glad they do it.
Dead Rhetoric: Tell us about the cover art for Collapse – and the artist Marc Provencher. Is it a collaborative process between the band and Marc, or did you trust his ideas and vision without stepping on toes?
Bacher: I’d say it’s collaborative – and I’d say what he did was awesome. The four of us sat in a room and looked at pictures that we liked, and talked about concepts. We met up with Marc and relayed the same information to him. He ran with it. I’m so excited about it.
Goyer: Matt had this great idea of the images of underwater caves. We thought that the idea of being underwater in these deep, dark caves and seeing the light was a very good fit emotionally and metaphorically with the themes of the music. That balance between feeling hopeless and feeling hopeful- just as we had on The Red and the Grey. We knew we wanted to have the image of a human, where you feel that emotion and we brought to Marc. He took that vision and brought it to life. A lot of the artwork is based on little pictures that he took of rocks and caves- even the figure itself is a model. I don’t know how he got everything into the same picture, but it fit.
Zappa: When we were coming up with ideas for what the album cover could be – I’m a big movie fan, and it reminded me of a lot of 80’s movies. 80’s movies had the best covers out of any movies out there. The first thing that came to mind was a movie called The Abyss, an 80’s movie that was super long, but really good. The Thing as well by John Carpenter, the opening look of the flyer where you can’t see the person’s face, you see this big white light – it had kind of a nebulous vibe to it. Movies are big influence when I write lyrics and any contributions that come from me in the group are usually movie related.
Dead Rhetoric: How did it come about to choose “Dead Ends” as the first video from the album, and can you tell us about the video shoot- as it’s quite different from most band performance work?
Ehramijan: It makes a statement. When the opening hits, it just gets your attention. We jump right into it, we don’t leave anything behind and it is just balls to the wall for the rest of the song. That just stood out as making the video for the song. A lot of the different angles and effects, Tony the director did an amazing job. That’s what makes the video stand out along with the song.
Bacher: We wrote that song to be the first song on the album. We needed something at the beginning of the album to kick your ass. I think we did that- and if this is the first impression that we want of people listening to the album, we also want this to be the first video that we release. It was a good choice.
Goyer: As far as the uniqueness of the video, Tony had us do some interesting things. We had to play at 200% speed, as well as 50% speed, which is painfully boring. It took us about 10 minutes to get through one take of the song- but it gives us some of those herky, jerky movements that we have.
Bacher: He had us all in the same room doing the performance, and then he had us all individually doing different takes- which he did to make a crazy, cool effect where I disappear a couple of times. A composite of the different images. This is us playing the music, but makes us look exciting.
Zappa: Steph and I went down to have meetings with Tony about what we were going for. Being a huge movie nerd- and he is as well – I was able to say, ‘hey, remember the shot from this movie?’ We wanted something to try… in the movie Seven, how dark and sporadic the lighting is in that one- we took that aspect and had a JJ Abrams/ Star Trek Super 8 flair vibe to it. Playing the song so slow and so fast, that came from the 90’s hip hop videos like Busta Rhymes, that made the video so jagged and almost like a cartoon character in a way. It punctuates the song, sort of being in your face. He also plays in that great band Pathogenic as well, and Lattermath.
Part II of Matt Coe’s talk with Protean Collective will post on Thursday, August 3rd.