Tesseract Join Forces With Karnivool And Car Bomb For Massive Australian Tour
‘For this Australian run, two of them are actually coming with us. Kat Marsh, the leader, and Rio Hellyer. She’s been there since day one with Choir Noir when they did their first show at the Royal Albert Hall with Bring Me The Horizon. They are the two senior figures, so to say. So that’s really exciting!’
TesseracT bassist Amos Williams drops that something beautifully magical when discussing his band upcoming tour of Australia.
‘There’s something really cool about making the huge cacophony and deeply layered thing that TesseracT is. Making that more human by taking some of those layers and having a human perform them. The relationship with Dan, suddenly he’s not alone on stage as the sole vocalist. He’s got an army of vocals with him. It seems to bring something out in him that’s very much different to the Dan that we’ve experienced for the past fifteen years. Now we’ve got Kat and Rio able to do those parts as well.’
‘There’s a really weird thing we noticed when we were recording ‘War Of Being’ that they mimic each other’s voices. Dan and Kat do this blurring thing where you can’t really tell what’s going on, who’s who at times. So, we’re really excited about bringing them along live to this Australian tour.’
It’s not often Australia gets a rarity from an international band, and off the back of the concert album and film for RADAR, which featured Choir Noir, it makes this tour extra special for fans and band alike.
‘It’s fantastic to be able to bring that show to Australia because in the past we’ve always found it a bit weird. We’re doing this headline run, touring the world, and yet because of the logistics of Australia, we’ve not been able to bring production. So, in some sense we’re bringing production on this one and I hope it leads to setting a precedent and being able to do the same in the future with our headline shows and festival shows over the next couple of years.’
Born out of satellite town north of London called Milton Keynes, the structured Lego built city gave rise to one of the most creative and inquisitive bands the metal world has seen.
‘Milton Keynes has actually got a bit of a history in terms of the underground scene. There’s two documentaries about the scene in Milton Keynes, which is surprising. There’s one online and it was talking about a place called The Pits that was this hub for not just the local community, but it was also a new touring spot for bands to come through. The venue was actually surprisingly good in terms of space, they ended up with some big bands go through there. Like, the famous story for them is Iron Maiden did a show.’
‘Off the top of my head there’s obviously TesseracT, but you’ve got Monuments as well, and both of those bands came from a band called Fellsilent, which the other documentary is about. That one’s being finished and will be released soon.’
‘But my point of all that long rambling journey was to explain there’s a community there, or at least there was a community there. Maybe it’s because the place is so fucking boring that people needed to think of things to do and their idea was to rant against the grey, devoid of morals, capitalist hells cape that they lived in perhaps, and create some punk rock and TesseracT has a huge amount of aspirational vision and creativity. We just don’t sit around and rest on our laurels.’
This shooting for the moon passion from Amos and his bandmates has seen them rise across the globe, and in recent years land in the iconic Abbey Road Studios, made famous primarily by The Beatles, for a recutting of the TesseracT’s debut One.
‘We were super lucky in that Ollie, the mastering engineer there, was not only about fifteen years younger than me, but also somebody that had been around listening to us when that album first came out. So, that was really intriguing to know that we were part of his journey to move into the technical sphere of mastering and mixing. We were obviously an influence with this band who, again, punching above their weight, are doing things that bands of our stature had absolutely no right to do at all.’
‘But also realising that unless somebody’s physically stopping you, nobody’s got the right to tell you not to do these things. You’ve got two options, either somebody pays for it or you do it yourself. I guess there’s an element of special interest in TesseracT that we learn how to do these things.’
‘As we’re walking into Abbey Road, we’re suddenly in a safe space. We’re in a place where the engineer actually loves the music, and he’s done all the work that needs to be done because he’s got the vision. He’s got the sympathetic technical standing in two worlds where he’s like, “Well, here’s what you should be, and here’s the technical limitations.” He knows how to find that result, so that was really wonderful, and it made the whole process more relaxing and much easier where, where we could just trust him, so much so that we went back to Abbey Road for the Atmos mix and mastering of ‘RADAR’, which again, it was a case of, “I’m just gonna let Ollie do this ’cause he knows what he’s doing,’ and we went and sat in the garden and had a glass of wine. So that’s how difficult Abbey Road was for us.’
Onto the Australian tour with Karnivool, off the back of their own stunning comeback album In Verses and Car Bomb, TesseracT prepare to explode to a country that has always been welcoming to them.
‘Aussie tours are awesome. They are quite tough ’cause there’s a lot of flying involved, and often there’s a lot of…Now, this concept is a bit strange to Europeans. The idea of getting on a plane and then playing a show, the same day is a bit gnarly. So that can be quite tough, ’cause sometimes you’re at the airport at, like, 5:00 AM which is not fun when you’ve got thirty pieces of luggage.’
‘That being said, again, crowds are wonderful. It’s worth every moment, and more often than not, we’re sad at the end of it because we’ve flown around Australia and we’ve seen nothing of it. Australia’s always a wonderful place for us. We have a fantastic time.’
‘I remember sat in a car listening to ‘Sound Awake’ when it came out and going, “Damn, this is a fun album,” and really loving the drums on it and the tone that the recording engineer was creating, getting real geeky about it.’
‘I’m really looking forward to hopefully spending more time with the guys and getting to a point where we’re like, “Hey, let’s do some more tours together,” ’cause frankly, they need to tour North America. They’ve not done that for a very long time. So, you know, if there was an opportunity to set that up between us, I’d do that in a heart beat.’
You heard it here first, promoters. North America, get them on. There is something new in the pipeline coming along too.
‘We’re doing things slightly differently this time. It’s always been a bit weird from our perspective for a band to go into a studio in a really concentrated amount of time, get this thing called an album, and then throw it out, and within six months you’re done. That sounds like we’re working for an industry rather than an industry working for us. We wanna live life because life educates us in a way that touring does not. If you’re on the road touring, I don’t know what you’ve got to say except of the pain of not being at home or the pain of traveling, which to some people is not a pain.’
‘I’m saying that because we’re leading up to the fact of, we’re recording as and when we can, but we’re not necessarily looking at an album. We’re going, “Hey, here’s a song.’ You know what? If this song is good, we’re gonna release it, and we’re gonna bring it out to you guys, and we’re gonna throw everything behind it. Then we’ll do the same again with another song. At the moment, that’s working really well for us from a creative standpoint. We are writing music with an idea of trying to keep our music at the forefront, and that might mean that things are different in the future. We’re gonna have to play it by ear. So yes, new music, but it might not be an album.’
Interview By Iain McCallum
Catch TesseracT on tour on the following date with Karnivool and Car Bomb, tickets from Destroy All Lines…
