Interview to MISERYFIELDS (USA)

1. Hey Isaac, pleasure to have you on Rotten Pages ´zine. How are you doing today? Let us set the scene first. Where do we find you right now? Please describe your surroundings.

Hello and welcome to my office studio! I'm settled at my desk between a huge electronic drum kit and a wall of far too many guitars and other instruments, including synthesizers, violins, and a mandolin, almost all of which were used on The End, with the exception of the mandolin.

2. Overall what has has been the greatest challenge you´ve faced up as a musician until today?

Honestly just having my music heard. It's difficult trying to promote yourself without sounding like that's your whole identity as a creative person and still balance that with seeming like a real person behind the music. No one really likes someone coming into a space, like a discord server or what have you, who immediately starts trying to shill their product, right?

3. You came from Winston Salem. Try to describe your home scene. Which bands do you consider the beneficial? Which from the home records did interest you the most?

Honestly the Winston Salem scene is fairly empty, in terms of metal music. There's dad rock, rap, and more country than you can shake a stick at, but not much metal at all. The most recent album from the area that interested me was the Relent album from Mortimer in 2019, which can also be found on Bandcamp.

4. Being the sole musician behind the band as well, would it be possible to tell us more about your personal musical background?

Sure! Both of my parents were very musically inclined, and I started learning how to play guitar nearly 30 years ago when I was only 6 years old because my parents couldn't afford a drum kit, or so they said (I think they just didn't want to hear the noise, if I'm honest). I became obsessed with Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica at a very young age and spent a lot of time trying to learn how to play their music just by listening to the songs, and eventually started writing my own music. Over the next 15 years or so, I wrote enough music to make several thrash metal and progressive metal albums, but most of them were reaching far beyond my musical abilities and were never released. In 2014, I actually had to stop playing music altogether because of a tendon issue in my left hand index finger that made it impossible to play any of my instruments without extreme pain. Then in 2022, I was teaching a friend how to restring a his new guitar and realised that it no longer hurt to play, so I picked it up again and over the next few months wrote the Reawakening EP, which was my first real foray into death metal. From there, it was a few short steps into writing The End.

5. Let´s talk about your debut album, How did you create the 7 tracks? Was it predetermined process, or did you leave substantial space for improvisations?

I initially wrote the first track, The End pt I, while I was just messing around after changing my guitar strings, and didn't think it was going to be anything really big. When I wrote the lyrics, starting with the opening monologue, "I once heard tales...", I realised it had the potential to be far more than I had initially imagined, and decided I would try to expand on the story, with the idea that the first track would actually be starting at the end of the story, going a step further than in medias res (starting the story in the middle of things) and going for something more...post medias res? Starting at the end of the story also gave me a way to think about what might have occurred for The Sojourner to get to where he was, what kinds of awful things he referenced in the "...and what mountains I have bested, what kingdoms laid bare" lines. I had the bones of a story laid out from that opening monologue, and that gave me enough ground to walk on to write the rest of the story.

6. The songs have the ability to sound both menacing as quite prog, the result is very fresh yet comfortable. Is this something you consciously aim for when writing your music?

I actually try not to consciously make any decisions at all when I'm writing, and I go by feel alone. If I sit down and say "I'm going to write something angry!" or soft or whatever, it never goes anywhere and I end up scrapping it. So I try to listen to where the music feels like it wants to go. For example, The Beginning leading into Cathedral, the transition between the two songs just felt right. The Beginning was heavy and fast and full of vim and vigour, and it needed space to breathe, a moment for The Sojourner to step back and take into account "I am on this journey...now what?", and I try to tell as much of the story through the music as I do the lyrics and vocals themselves, and if the music is taking a different route than the path I had intended, I'm just another passenger on the ride and I have to go where it wants to go.

7. “The End” is a concept album following the story of the Sojourner on his quest to find Eden. Could you reveal something more whats hidden behind this concept?

The story is kind of a look into my own ideological arguments with the beliefs in organised religion, which I kind of dropped the fourth wall on in the first monologue for The End pt II. The idea that some greater being could sit back and watch as terrible things happen doesn't sit well with me, which I know isn't any kind of grand revelation among people who listen to this kind of music, but a relatable idea sells, you know? Plus The Sojourner is also initially supposed to be a symbol for the average religious person today, the kind of person who does awful things "in the name of god" and then says that they're doing it out of love, or whatever. The Sojourner is not a good person, and in the writing process, before he got the Sojourner title, I actually just referred to him as The Idiot. He does change his tune, no pun intended, after Ash and Stone, and by the end of the album he becomes radicalised to asking the God figure "why do you allow this to happen?", to which the God figure basically says "you made these choices yourself, I didn't allow it, you just chose". He also says it in Latin, because I can't resist a bit of cliche theatrics. "Culpa tua est" means simply, "it's your fault", and "somnus fili" is "it's time to rest".

8. In general are you personally pleased with the way how the album turned out in terms of production and mixing? What were the main challenges you faced in learning to mix music and how did you overcome them?

I'm quite pleased! I had never properly mixed anything before, and spent months going through as many mixing tutorials as I could find for each of the instruments I recorded. The worst part was how often I would have to stop what I was doing and restart the mixing process from the ground up because I would start tweaking too many things and ruin it, simply because I wasn't sure of what I was doing. What definitely made it much more difficult was that I wasn't doing any kind of direct input recording, the way most modern bands do it with amp simulators and cab simulators, I was recording directly from my pedal board, so if there was a sound that I ended up not liking, I would have to completely rerecord the entire song for that instrument. I've since upgraded to direct input recording and building my sounds in my DAW rather than in my pedals and the process is much smoother and easier now.

9. Where is your favorite place to write your songs? And from what symbols, feelings, stories or environments do you get inspiration?

I mainly just write in the office. I've got my whole setup for recording right at my computer so that if I find something neat I can just open Reaper and record it immediately, but I also tend to keep a guitar in the living room so I can noodle on the couch while I'm watching movies and just find melodies that feel like they could go somewhere. Inspiration though, can come from basically anything. Lyrically, I get a lot of inspirations from very old literature, Dante's Inferno, Victorian poetry, things like that, but I also get a lot of inspiration from video games, namely Dark Souls and Blasphemous. The dark religious themes and vibes of "there's something rotten underneath the surface" are very cool and I like trying to capture that feeling.

10. Is it hard for you to create new riffs and ideas for yourselves in death metal, since so much of the genre was established before?

I wouldn't say so? I tend not to actually listen to a lot of death metal and deathcore and find a lot more musical inspiration in classical and baroque music. There's the jokes about every death metal and deathcore band in the early 2000s writing the same riff for all of their songs and that's simply because everyone was listening to each other's music and getting inspiration from each other. Before working on The End, I actually did a heavy metal cover of the Beethoven String Quartet in A minor op 18 no 4, and that informed a lot of my writing and playing over the course of The End, mainly from the huge chord structures and how the melodies were able to weave around them in ways that aren't really that prevalent in a lot of death metal and deathcore. Minor third harmonies are fun, but so are huge augmented chords that span 6 frets that require a hand big enough to pick up a basketball without help. When I'm writing my rhythm guitar parts, I try to find chords shapes that feel like they could be played in a string quartet and basic power chords and thirds aren't going to cut it there, you know?

11. Do you think there is a point with technical death metal where it will reach its pinnacle in terms of songwriting?

Just like there are more combinations in the order of cards in a deck than could be counted in our time in this universe, there are six strings on a basic guitar and 24 frets to play them on, and more combinations therein than the deck of cards. And then you can consider different modes and scales, open tunings, drop tunings, inspirations coming from different genres, from music from different cultures...I think we're okay.

12. Have you ever considered enlisting members to handle the various instruments in order to perform live, and if not, why not?

I have considered it, actually, but I honestly don't know that I would be able to make a choice of what instrument I would want to play if I were to play live. What would be the most fun for me to play? Could I jump around the stage and play one instrument for one song and another for the next? Would I not want to play any instruments at all and just do the vocals alone and let other people play the music? I don't think I would be able to make a choice like that because so much of each instrument in every song is so integrally me that I don't know that I could trust someone else to present it in the way that I would. That's also why I don't program any of the instruments, because I want everything to be as honestly the best that I can present by myself, that anything else would be, well, dishonest.

13. Let’s conclude this interview with you telling your future plans with MiseryFields. I hope you enjoyed the interview.

I can't tell you much, because I want to keep as many secrets as I can, but I can tell you that we may not yet be finished with The Sojourner and his story.

Thanks so much!

 - Isaac

https://miseryfields.bandcamp.com/album/the-end