Metal Wani’s Carl O’Rourke recently sat down with Tesseract guitarist, James Monteith, to talk about the bands new album, ‘Sonder’, the varying levels of importance the band have for record concepts, and working through eighty submissions from fans to potentially feature on it.
With regards to whether the band shared a unified or individual relationships to ‘Sonder’, James shared,
“In terms of a relationship to the record, I guess we all have varying levels of whether the concept is important or if just the music is important. Like Acle, for example, is very much just purely the music. The concept is something that is important that adds to the product but it’s less important to him than the actual music itself. Whereas Dan for example, and Amos, the concept is almost everything and tells the whole story of a record. So, I guess I probably sit somewhere in between the two.”
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James concluded,
“I think it’s something we can all get behind [The concept]. We live in a time when I think it’s very important to remember we’re not the only people on this planet. There’s so much going on in the world that we should be aware of and not be self centered, I think also.”
On how the band retain a balance between technical proficiency and passionate playing, James said,
“In terms of ambiance, we worked even closer with Aidan O’Brien, who is our front of house engineer and also co-songwriter on some of the tracks. He put a lot into this album in terms of the atmospherics and sounds. One thing in particulate he did which was really interesting on this record was he did a call out for field recordings. We got people to make loads of recordings and send them in and if there were any usable samples we would then include them in the album. I think we got about eighty submissions and about half of them made it on the record in some way or other.”
“It was a really interesting idea and it also helped with the concept as well. Ultimately, inviting everyone to be involved and appreciating our fans. And also being aware that they could contribute something to the record, which we would never have thought of, which certainly they did. If you listen to it back and you hear any odd, strange sounds, mostly of them would have derived from soundbites sent in from fans. It’s cool.”