Interview with death metal band Ulcerate
Ulcerate is a death metal band from New Zealand, but unlike many metal acts in this genre, they go beyond the riffage and technical demonstration to put the emphasis on dissonant textures and atmospheres as they constantly build up and release tension, thus creating great dynamics and powerful climaxes within the songs. They do this with great versatility, switching from slow-paced, dark and smooth soundscapes to bursts of utter, punishing brutality, maintaining a dense, hypnotic, desolate, post apocalyptic atmosphere all the way through. Definitely a unique band who just set foot in Europe for the second time in its career, with a swiss date on the 20th February. I had the great pleasure of asking the amazing drummer Jamie Saint Merat a few questions by e-mail.
Interview and text : Arnaud Mittempergher
Pour lire cette interview en français, cliquer ici.
Arnaud Mittempergher (AM): You have been playing with guitarist Michael Hoggard since your highschool years, even before forming Ulcerate. What kind of music were you playing back then ? When and how did you have the idea of creating the overwhelmingly bleak atmosphere Ulcerate is now known for? How long did it take for you to really have a precise vision of the sound you wanted ? Besides the aforementioned dark atmosphere, Ulcerate is also really unique in its riffage, sound and complex songwriting. Was it really important to you to create your own specifique musical niche ? Did you go into that direction because nobody hadn’t really done it yet, or was this a really personal appeal to you ?
Jamie Saint Merat (JSM): The first kinds of music we were dabbling in were primitive forms of death metal, which eventually evolved into what became our first demos. Pretty crude stuff really, what can be usually expected of teenagers. I don’t really think we managed to really get the sound that we we were aiming to achieve until our second album ‘Everything is Fire’. There’s bits and pieces of the previous material that in hindsight came out as intended, but it’s really that second album where things really made sense.
In terms of a personal niche, we certainly want to make music that is our own and hopefully adds something to the death metal canon long term. The most important thing for us is to write and play material that we’re incredibly proud of and something we can call our own. And of course, I don’t think there’s any point in just re-hashing the same sound again and again, so yeah, it’s satisfying to write from that perspective as well.
AM: Aside from the explicit sickness reference (the ulcer had long been considered as a psychosomatic disease caused by anxiety, now it’s known to be caused by a specific bacteria), what is the idea you want to get across with the band name ‘Ulcerate’ ?
JSM: These days the band name I’m not so fond of, but it is what it is and there’s no point in changing it. On our very first demo we had a track called ‘Ulceration’, and lyrically that song seemed to define a lot of our conceptual base at the time. We were operating under another moniker, and our vocalist at the time had a much more blasphemous approach to lyrics, so we developed the ‘Ulcerate’ moniker as a metaphorical infection of the mind, I guess specifically due to religion etc. We were all still teenagers then, and the slightly acerbic title was a lot more attractive than it would be today.
AM: Michael Hoggard plays really indiosyncratic, intricate, twisting, dissonant guitar lines (which perfectly fits the complex and unpredictable song structures), with a lot of work put on the counterpoint and rythmic interplay. Who has been influential to his playing ? What inspires him when writing riffs ?
JSM: Originally when starting to find a path for ourselves, obviously Immolation and Gorguts really opened our eyes to what can be done with a guitar in a death metal context. But also bands like Today is the Day (particularly ‘In the Eyes of God’), early Cryptopsy, early Hate Eternal shaped a lot of how the guitar work was approached early on. Later Jesu, Sigur Rós, Neurosis, Cult of Luna etc all played a part in again furthering what can be done with guitar driven music, yet still managing to capture a wall of noise sound, that we’ve become very fond of.
AM: After composing the foundation of a song with Michael Hoggard, you spend time jamming together to get other ideas, refine the song and settle on your drum parts. Is jamming a part of your more jazzy approach to music (accents, feel and rudiments, odd time signatures, free-flowing vibe) ? You also handle everything else for the band, what is your favorite part of the whole process (laying down the first ideas, jamming, finalizing the songs, recording, mixing, mastering, designing art, listening to the albums or playing them live) ?
JSM: Jamming and improvisation to me is just something I’ve always done with drumming, Even when playing live and tracking albums I’m still really free with fills and phrasings, it’s just how I’ve always played. And yeah that takes cues from a lot of jazz, fusion and a lot of styles outside of typically really rigid metal.
I enjoy playing the most, be it live or otherwise, just the sheer physicality of it is very powerful. But all facets of the bands work is incredibly fulfilling, just not as immediately exciting as the playing part.
AM: Your drumming is really remarkable. Not only is it extremely dense, powerful and technical, it is also very versatil and you can perfectly switch from sheer brutality to soft and nuanced playing. And what makes it really special are these incredible time signatures and song structures that give the feeling that you can’t completely grab onto them : a kind of hypnotic, wandering, sinuous feeling that I personaly find really addictive. How do you compose your drum parts ? Do you get some kind of influence from any other bands (old or new) ? Do you have a hard time memorizing all this material because of how complex it is ? Do you also write guitar riffs for Ulcerate ? What is your favorite Ulcerate track and why ? Which one do you prefer to play and why ?
JSM: Well I’m really glad you have picked up on those first things you mentioned, that’s more or less where all my efforts go with drumming. Obviously throughout the band’s career we’ve always had the customary speed and aggression necessary for the style, but I’ve always tried to find ways to bring subtleties and nuances into the song-writing without sounding trite or forced. And I think with the last two albums especially I’m getting a lot closer to being able to execute all that correctly. In terms of odd meter and song structures that are intangible feeling, that’s exactly what we want to do with the band. I’ve had a few people raise an eyebrow when I say that 90% of our songs are in odd meter, but we work really hard on making it very fluid and organic feeling - the oddness of the patterns and groupings make things have a churning sound to them, but not so much if you can hear the cycle of bars you known? You end up getting that ‘odd for odd’s sake’ kind of sound where it sounds like counting numbers.
I compose the drum parts as we mentioned before, work out a very rough phrasing to go with the guitars, then just improv over that to work out the finer details. Sometimes things fall together really quickly, but sometimes what I want to play and what I can actually play are two very different things, so I’ll need to keep coming back to it until it’s comfortable. I get influence from everywhere, the aggression I can get from any of the staple extreme bands I listens to, and the rhythmic and sticking ideas I’ll often pick up off of clinic guys like Mayer, Minneman, Coleman, Weckl, Greb, Gavin Harrison, Chambers. So it’s just about developing a really broad vocabulary, and then hopefully being able to use at least some of it when we write. I don’t really have a tough time with memorizing things these days, as my motor skills are catching up with what I would like to play, but it’s certainly been tough in the past. In terms of riffs, no, I leave that to the professionals haha. But most of the riffs are constructed with both Mike and myself in one room discussing ideas. I used to bring riffs to the table, but my skillset on a guitar is just nowhere near what it needs to be for our latter day material.
I think that my favorite Ulcerate track is ‘Everything is Fire’, it’s just a really fucking immense song and encapsulates everything we do in one 8 minute block. It was purposefully written to close the album, so has a very ‘final’ sound to it that I dig, and drumming-wise it’s exceptionally tricky to nail, but really rewarding to play, a lot of nuances and rhythmic ideas going on.
AM: When considering your three albums, it seems that you keep scaling back the original franticness and ferociousness of the first album in favor of a greater emphasis on atmosphere and a larger scope of dynamics in the songwriting. On the last album, you kept going a bit further in that direction, this meaning a less incisive, slower-paced songwriting , and a more fluid, heavy, diffuse approach. What’s your opinion about this ? What’s going to be your approach on the next album ? Do you fear you might someday spread the Ulcerate musical concept too thin and won’t be able to create an album that is going to be innovate from your previous works ?
JSM: Yeah that’s certainly been the progression do far, but it’s not necessarily the case that we want to keep stripping things back melodically - as you said we’ll end up with nowhere to go! At our core we are a death metal band, and none of us want to lose that, I’ve said before that if we lose that essence we should probably start again as a new project. But at the same time, we’re kind of addicted to this bleakness and crushing sound that we can create, so there’s going to be no relent in that department. Oddly enough, I recently saw Lars Von Trier’s ‘Melancholia’, and I think the feeling you get at the end of that film more or less equates to how I’ve always seen what what we’re doing with Ulcerate - if we can create the vibe of having your heart just ripped clean out of your chest while the world ends, l’ll be a happy man !
AM: The different themes throughout the albums are written through recurrent sociological and philosophical lenses. You speak of subjects such as the desire for humankind to seek spiritual answers and its insignificance in the vastness of the universe, the constant change and progression of everything, the thirst for power in society, the arrogance of religion, to name a few. What would you say is the deep message of Ulcerate beyond these different specific themes ? What does the band really want to express through its music, what is the core philosophy behind it all ?
JSM: I think most importantly it’s worth noting that the music definitely comes first, and any over-arching themes come afterwards to support that music. Collectively we’ve always just wanted the lyrical content to be grounded in reality and speak of things that are actually happening, fantasy of any kind has just never suited what we’re doing. The heart of all our themes is really the insignificance of man in the greater scheme of things, and this then allows all the other ideas to flow on from there. This core philosophy is heard throughout the music, there’s a definite and very direct approach to try and make the music as large and as crushing as possible.
AM: The cover of the last album ‘The Destroyers Of All’ symbolises the conflictual nature of all living creatures, the one of ‘Of Fracture And Failure’ symbolises the downfall of mankind and the birth of another dominant species. What about the cover of ‘Everything Is Fire’ ?
JSM: The overall theme of ‘Everything Is Fire’ was that everything is in a constant state of evolution and progression, that paradigms of thought are changing ever more rapidly, and that the more humanity educates itself, the humbler we become, and that our significance in the grand scheme of things is becoming more and more challenged. So, the cover art is my interpretation visually of those themes. There’s really nothing entirely figurative about the piece, it’s just me knowing what we wanted to get across with the music and lyrics, and putting that into something visual.
AM: You always get a lot of great reviews from magazines and webzines throughout the world since your first album. Is the recognition from the critics and the public a goal or a driving force for Ulcerate ? Are you happy with where you are right now or do you feel that you need to achieve more in order to be fully satisfied ?
JSM: It’s not a driving force at all, but it’s very humbling and really validating that we’re on the right track. Very happy with where we are right now, I’m writing this on the plane as we fly to your continent to tour for a month of dates, which I still find incredible that we can do this. So long as we can continue making death metal that is the death metal all of us want to play on a nightly basis, then nothing else really needs to change.
AM: You signed with Relapse Records in November. They have many big names in their roster. How did that happen and what effects do you think it will that have on the band (more tours, significant increase in record sales) ? Same question regarding your upcoming show at the Maryland Deathfest in May.
JSM: After we released ‘Everything is Fire,’ Relapse got in touch and said that they’d be interested in working with us. So it was just a matter of us saying ‘yes’ really. For us, Relapse is a label that will allow us to keep making the music as we always have, but with a larger network and better support than we’ve had in the past, just in terms of contacts and how they’re structured as a label. Touring has always been coordinated by ourselves, and as for album sales, I’m not really sure if things will increase there or not, that’s not a goal really.
As for MDF, they asked us to do the show, and we said yes. We needed to get to North America sooner than later, so it has enabled us to book a small string of our own sideshows around the date, for us to test the water over there.
AM: Now some questions about yourself… How did you get into metal and what did you like about that genre ? How about now, has this changed over time ? What kind of music have you been listening to lately ? How wide is your musical spectrum ? From an 2011 interview I read it seems that you don’t listen to much brutal music anymore, you named some post-rock bands (Jakob, Sigur Rós), some stoner (Clutch) and some more alternative/prog metal (Katatonia, Porcuptine Tree). Are you done with death metal ? If so, is that because of the fact that the scene is saturated with soulless copycats or do you now like brighter energies better ? What do you think of the metal scene nowadays ?
JSM: I got into metal when I was 13 or so just like any other teenager. I was instantly drawn to the really fuck-off nature of it, and very shortly began looking for styles that were a lot more aggressive and powerful. I was very quickly drawn to bands that took that over-the-top intensity and added really interesting rhythmic and melodic ideas, really blew my mind, particularly from a drumming point of view. My tastes in metal have slowly over time narrowed into the darker end of the spectrum, particularly as you mentioned my listening palette in general has widened. So for me, a lot of modern death metal doesn’t do a lot for me as its missing the dark, oppressive energy I find so fascinating about the style to begin with. Nowadays the death and black scenes are certainly overloaded with a glut of awful bands, but there’s also a bunch of really great stuff that keeps me interested for sure. I’d say that still 70% of my listening is death and black metal, so it’s not like I hate the music I play haha.
AM: You started playing drums when you were thirteen and spent only one year with a teacher before handling everything yourself from music sheets. Back then, what drummers were influential to you and what did you like about them ?
JSM: Drumming at that point for me was incredibly primitive, most of what I was hearing I couldn’t comprehend. That early my influences were something like Jimmy Chamberlain, Vinnie Paul, Paul Bostaph, maybe Donald Tardy. Very early on I became infatuated with double bass, so it was me trying to wrap my head around how to coordinate your feet and hands.
AM: How many hours a day do you practise ? Do you need a strict, regular practice in order to keep up the speed and intensity of Ulcerate ?
JSM: The band rehearses for nights a week, three hour sessions. Outside of that I drum everyday for at least an hour if time permits. And yeah, it’s definitely a maintenance thing with Ulcerate, if you want to feel totally on top of things, just got to keep doing it all the time.
AM: You record your drums really quickly (five hours for the entire album ‘The Destroyers Of All’ with only small reworking of parts the following day), you don’t cheat with quantization (digitally setting the performed musical notes on the beat to eliminate some imprecisions) or fabrication of parts, you only trigger your kick drums (each performed hit triggers a pre-recorded sound in order to get a clearer sound during the fast tempos) and you keep everything as flat as possible EQ-wise (modify certain sound frequencies to eliminate or make more prominent certain sounds) in post-production. Is all that a kind of stand against all the drummers who do this kind of things ?
JSM: No not really, it’s just how I want my drums to sound. The speed of tracking the album is just because I want to keep things spontaneous and capture the performance. Dropping in for every section and just playing it again and again isn’t really playing the song you know ?
To me things like quantization and beat replacement for every drum etc. suck all the life out of the playing. I hear bits and pieces of a lot of the ‘bigger’ releases these days, and it all sounds like the same drummer - same samples, same beats, all oddly perfectly tight. Drums to me is an instrument that should never sound that way, certainly never does in the room.
AM: You are a full time web designer. What got you interested in this activity ? As I already pointed out, you also record, mix, master and design art for Ulcerate. How did you learn all that stuff and what is the philosophy behind this « do it yourself » approach ? Do you feel a strong need of creating art ? What does it all mean to you ? What are your other interests in life ?
JSM: I’ve always been interested in art and design, studied it all through high school, and the completed a Bachelors in Media Arts after school. The web part just came out of a necessity to learn the craft, particularly as the band always provided an outlet for that. As for the production side of things, that just grew organically from demoing our music at high school on shitty tape four-tracks, then figuring out how to use Pro Tools etc, and then eventually leading through to our album work. So the DIY thing just sort of happened, it’s the only way we’ve recorded, and I think it’s really helped us sound a little different than most bands, even if the results aren’t always as professional as they could be if we went elsewhere.
So yeah, the band and my 9-5 career keeps me 100% satisfied in terms of creative output, and it’s something that I need to do every day to stay engaged. Art, design, music are more or less all my interests in life, I guess fiction and film are what I’m really into outside of that, travel as well.
AM: That’s it ! Thanks a lot for spendind some time answering my questions, I wish you all the best for Ulcerate future plans and I’m really looking forward to seeing you live in February !
JSM: Cheers !
To the official website: http://www.ulcerate-official.com/
Tags: Arnaud Mittempergher, Band, Death Metal, English, Interview, Ulcerate
Article paru le 14.02.2012 à 11:19 Uhr