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Interview with

Amos Williams (Bass) of TesseracT


The name TESSERACT has caused quite a buzz with fans of Progressive Metal. The ‘Concealing Fate’ EP in October 2010, back then with a different singer, made them first prick up their ears and then impatiently waiting for the release of the debut album ‘One’ that has finally seen the light of day last Friday. Since we’ve been excited as much as everyone else we took the chance to get a few questions answered from the band’s bassist Amos Williams.

Reflections of Darkness (RoD): Why did you choose TESSERACT as your name in the first place?
Amos:I wish it was as fantastic and as meaningful as everyone seems to believe it is, but I’m afraid to say it’s not. Whilst to us the meaning of the name has started to mean more and more, and in fact the word tesseract is probably more inspirational to us than anything in this world, its use as our band name is somewhat mundane, funny…but still mundane. Acle, our guitarist and chief songwriter was watching a really terrible movie called: Cube 2: Hypercube (!!!) -  Acle, found the word interesting (certainly more interesting than the movie at any rate), so he entered it into a search engine and one of the returns was the term tesseract. That’s it. It is, as I’ve just said a very inspirational topic, however. Although none of us are professors of physics, we all love popular science and are all avid followers of such visionaries as Stephen Hawkins, Brian Greene and Michio Kaku. As we’ve started to write the second album, it’s become more and more influenced by these themes and ideas.

RoD:
How long have you been working altogether on ‘One‘?
Amos: The very first recording we did was the drum tracking for the penultimate song on ‘One’ called ‘April’. Initially it was only meant to be a production demo to see what Acle and myself could do, as we wished to record live drums rather than program them, which is pretty much the standard today. Fortunately the recording went so well that we decided to use that ‘demo’ as the final drum tracks for that song. This was in July of 2008...yes, a very long time ago indeed. This made us realise that we had to the whole album this way. As all of were working full-time it was quite difficult to get us all in the same place at the same time, and to make things worse because we were paying for everything ourselves and only wished to use high end professional studios with good enough rooms to record in, we had to wait until the studios were available, which was only once every few months. Coupled with the fact that we had already started touring, it almost meant that recording was quite low down on the list of things to do. So, all in all it took us about 30 or 40 days to record, mix and master the album, but this was spread out over 2 years. Whilst it was frustrating for us, upon reflection I feel it was necessary and the album would not have turned out as well as it did if it were to have been created in a shorter length of time.

RoD: How did you feel when the album was finally finished?
Amos:The day we mastered the album and sat back and listened to it the whole way through for the first time was glorious. It was as if a massive weight had been lifted off all our shoulders. It’s quite bizarre, as we feel as if we’ve come to the end of a journey, whereas in reality and certainly to the public it’s just the beginning.

RoD: How were the press reactions so far and are you satisfied?
Amos: It’s been really exciting for us to see such a volume of press and to have seen it grow from a few websites to a few magazines to many. We’re really quite flattered by it all. The most amazing thing to us is that we can’t read half of them because they’re in so many different languages. I would never of expected for our music to have reached places like Greece and Serbia and for it then to have been received so well in these different lands.  It has made us feel justified in how much effort we put into the making of this album. 

RoD: Could you elaborate on the concept behind the ‘Concealing Fate’ hexalogy and its meaning within the scopes of the album?
Amos:There are two meanings to ‘Concealing Fate’. The titles help describe the emotions that have arisen from each track. I say arisen because although we wished to create a multi-parted ‘opus’, the result came about more through serendipity rather than strict design. The instrumental element of Concealing Fate describes the story of our journey of ‘growing up’ and is an allegory of discovery. Both from a microscopic view of the individual and the macroscopic view of the culture in which they live. ‘Acceptance - part one’ deals with the situation that we all experience when we start on our journey. We are born into certain circumstances, be they rich, poor or ordinary, they are all out of our control.

We have to accept these without choice in order to begin to grow and travel forward. ’Deception - part two’ is about the internal struggle that is created by the growing beliefs system we create as we grow up and its conflict with what we’ve been told our parents and society in which we grew up in. ’The Impossible - part three’ describes the place or state of being that we start to create as an ideal life, and how we often feel this place is unobtainable, or impossible to reach, as if on a far way shore, we can see it but cannot reach it. ’Perfection - part four’ describes this perfect life/feeling.

’Epiphany - part five’ is instrumental but is a representation of the energy you feel when you have that sudden moment of understanding, it’s thrilling exciting and you feel all powerful. This moment of epiphany is the realisation that everything you wish to be, all you ever need to become what you wish to be was given to you right at the start of your life, hence the name ’Origin’. And how this can become an empowering and wonderful thing. The second meaning, that of the lyrical content of each part, I will leave up to personal interpretation as I do not wish to remove that right from the audience. 

RoD: Are the other songs in some way connected to ‘Concealing Fate’, or do they stand for separate stories`?
Amos: Whilst the album is ordered in a certain way to maximise the impact of each song in the context of the album as a whole, the rest of the album is not thematically connected to ‘Concealing Fate’.  They each have separate stories. Some are about the passing of life and how we each see the same point in time from different perspective. Others are about the question of Nature vs. nurture, is someone born ‘evil’. And others still are about the planet and how short sighted it is for us to destroy our home.

RoD:
The song ‘April’ blew me away, especially the atmospheres are pretty intense and I started wondering…What kind of background story is it that brings forth such moods?
Amos:Again the instrumental elements and lyrical elements have different vibes that come together to create a complex whole. The drums and bass at the start of the song create a very intimate and deeply personal feel that is then contrasted by a very epic and vast almost crushing guitar line alongside a haunting vocal part. As for the lyrical element. Dan our vocalist was a policeman for many years, and without going into too much detail (as it trivialises the real person behind the story) the song is about one of the cases he was involved in.

RoD: How are your songs coming about? Are you jamming and then taking the best parts of the sessions for tracks?
Amos:Acle is our main song-writer. He will create a demo, or even just record a riff and then send it to us via mp3. We’ll then each learn these tracks at home, discuss them (at great length) and get them to a point where we can then all turn up at the rehearsal studio and be able to play them straight away. At this point we discover quite quickly what works as a live song and works best as a recorded song. We’ll either try as hard as we can to make the demo playable or change the part so it is playable. Now this is often where the most creative elements of our music arise. 

RoD: When will you be touring to support the album?
Amos:The official release date for the album is March 22nd. We start a tour with Protest the Hero and Maylene and the Sons of Disaster on March 23rd that will take us on tour throughout the Canada and the US over the following 2 months. We are at this very moment working on plans to revisit Europe, Russia and beyond and will hopefully be on as many festivals throughout Europe as we can this spring and summer.

RoD: Is there anything special, planned for the live performances, or is it plain and simple TESSERACT live and direct?
Amos:Without meaning to sound too arrogant there is nothing plain and simple about TesseracT, haha! The logistics are always a real headache and require a lot of preparation to make it all run smoothly and look plain and simple. As we will be mostly in support slots whilst touring this year our stage show will be minimal. But we are developing our stage show and hope to incorporate video and synchronised lighting as soon as we can. However, the live interpretations of the songs have evolved slightly since we finished recording them. This is one reason why we decided to create the DVD that comes with the special edition version of the album.

We filmed and recorded a live version of Concealing Fate, which is us all together in a very high end studio playing the whole of Concealing Fate right the way through. As this was a DVD we realised that we would be able to do this all in surround sound too (5.1), which is something we’ve always wished to do, and as a result of the success of this we’re looking forward to doing more of this in the future.

RoD: While we’re speaking of touring. You’ve been on tour supporting Devin Townsend last year. How was it?
Amos:Every night was a complete ’tour de force’ of performance. Watching a whole tour of DTP (and trust me we all watched every show) was a wonderful education is song writing and performance. The whole band gives so much to the audience and shares all they have with them. I wish more bands had the same ethic. 

RoD: Any chance of seeing you playing in Germany some time? Maybe at a festival?
Amos:We have a very good agent now who is working very hard to get us on as many festivals as we can get this year, I would hope that at least a few of them would be in Germany. I personally would love to play Wacken as that festival is very famous over here in the UK and is held in very high esteem in the metal world, so it would be something of an honour to play that festival for us.

RoD: If there’s anything you’d like to add, you can do that here.
Amos:I’d like to thank our fans. They have been wonderfully supportive and almost zealous (but in a positive way) in promoting us and our music to their communities. We feel really lucky to have such a wide and wonderful extended family. We’ll do the best that we can to come and see as many of you as possible.

RoD: Thanks very much for taking the time to answer the questions.
Amos:Thank you! Trust me, a musician likes nothing more than talking about themselves :-)


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