[Diogene303]

See link to this i found today , recorded from the london show on the 5th of sept 2008

soundshock.net - Meshuggah interview (VIDEO)

[loktide]

man, that background noise is fucking annoying

[Ziltoid]

Originally Posted by loktide

man, that background noise is fucking annoying

Still pretty interesting though.

[Zak1233]

Originally Posted by loktide

man, that background noise is fucking annoying

tell me about it lol

[TomAwesome]

It's very difficult to hear anything. I listened to about half of the first response and stopped the video, because I knew it would drive me nuts trying to strain to hear through the whole thing. Thanks anyway, though!

[eegor]

Yeah, I couldn't hear a damn thing.

[TonalArchitect]

If you don’t want to listen to the background noise, I’ve transcribed it to the best of my abilities. I left out the occasional like, um, or trailed off sentence that Martin or Asif used, but the important content should all be here. I altered slightly, paraphrased, and truncated some sentences, but the content should still be there. Sorry if I got something wrong.I also left out one section about touring and band mishaps, but these, I think, are all listed on Wikipedia, and I was getting tired.

Asif Salam: It’s been a long time since Meshuggah came to [the UK (?) Everyone’s kinda happy and we [hope to] get a good show. What do you think?

Martin: I hope so. [paraphrased here] It’s been a while since we’ve been in London.

Asif: How is the tour going so far, because you’ve got really good material.

Martin: It’s going good. This is the seventh show, I think. Since we released the album in March, we’ve been doing a U.S. tour with Ministry. And when we came back we did the first European run, and then we’ve been doing, like most bands, festivals throughout the summer. What’s happening now is we’re finishing up this [I’m not sure here] hopefully two and a half or three weeks into it it’ll be as good as it is now. We’re just like ‘look down the road.’ We’ve got Japan that’s coming up; we’ve got Australia coming up. We’re doing a lot of new territories this time. So it’s going to be fun.

Asif: There’s been a long gap between the releases of Nothing and Obzen, Was Obzen a more difficult album for the band?

Martin: Well, yes and no. Every album is a challenge in its own right. For the simple fact that whenever we come out of a recording, we look back as to whether we got a lot to do, you know, if it’s practical stuff coming off the road. But it’s not, it’s mostly a matter to sit back and listen to what comes naturally, Sometimes it’s swift, and sometimes it’s really slow, so it depends you know?

But this time around, it’s fairly safe to say that coming from Catch 33, which was this main, big, kind of a soundtrack-- nightmarish metal soundtrack-- having realized that we we’re coming out on the other side feeling really good about it, we felt that the most natural progression was to take a little bit of everything we’ve been doing (?) over the years and put it in a regular song format. So I would say that this time around we had a pretty good sense of purpose when we came into the writing process without being deliberate or anything.

But it depends very much on the project; there has to be one spark which gets the ball rolling and then everybody starts writing. On Catch 33, we were all within the studio, and we were writing on the same computer to make everything into one project.

This time, we were all sitting [in different rooms]. I was in my room, Tomas was in his room, Jens in his room. Dick was in Gothenberg, so he wasn’t actually around. But the thing was that when you go in between the rooms and listen to the other guys. It kind of self-feedbacks as far as inspiration goes, which helped a tremendous amount on this album.

Whenever you felt like “ahh… I’m spent,” you could kick back for a couple of hours and just walk around and listen to the other guys rooms. Hearing that stuff coming out makes you say “ah, I’ve gotta sit down and play.” Everyone was feeding off each other.

Asif: What is the meaning behind Obzen, and could you describe it as a concept did.

Martin: On a certain level, yes, but we never do concepts like Operation Mind[something]. You know, ‘here comes a guy and this is what happens.’ But there’s a general theme as far as the atmosphere goes. Catch 33 was very much an album about psychology, paradox. Whereas Obzen is a down-stated metaphorical statement of the state of humanity and society. And the world the way you see it from a[n outside] perspective.

It’s a play on words, “obscene” and “zen.” It really doesn’t allude to Zen Buddhism itself. But to look at humanity, it seems that we’re taking pride in being ‘we’re so great, we have all these technological achievements.’ We should be able to fight poverty , we should be able to fight disease, we should be able to fight this and that. And our leaders are standing there saying “oh yeah, we’re doing so much good for everybody, and we’re trying to get everybody along….’ This system they’ve put into effect has nothing to do with what we’re (they’re ?) saying.

It seems that Humanity has found its truest inner moment caked in blood, being driven by greed. We’re not saying that this is bad, but we’re talking about this paradox. That we perceive ourselves as being such high entities when we’re actually worse than most animals, which explains the album art. This guy is in a state of nirvana, but is covered in blood. Through the blood shed he’s reaching this nirvana.

Asif: Of course, all the review on Obzen have been great,. Everyone loved it. [this is hard to tell] Did you expect to create a great piece, or did the piece exceed your expectations?

Martin: That’s a tough one to answer. When we were younger, we read a lot more reviews. But then we realized a good review’s a good review; a bad review’s a bad review; but there’s nothing more to it, You could really feel bad about a really bad review and really good about a good review, but….It’s just an opinion,. But for sure it’s a lot more fun to get a good review than pummeled,

Every album is a surprise; you never know how people

Asif: are going to react to it….

Martin: Yeah. So most of the time-- luckily for us they’ve been good-- but sometimes you’ll read a review and they’ll say “I love it,” but they love it for completely different reasons than why we made it. So sometimes you read a reivew and are like “damn, this guy really gets it, “ and sometimes “this guy didn’t really get it,” but it doesn’t matter.

The interesting this about movies, music, art in general is the clash between the owner and the product. How people take something that you put out and did one thing with and made it something else through their impressions.

Asif: [I don’t know what this poorly-enunciating sonofabitch is saying, so I’m not going to write anything]

Martin: We’ve had our share of bad luck and we’ve had our share of bad timing.

[I’m sorry, this is touring stuff and I think I’m starting to get carpal tunnel, and I bet this same stuff is on Wikipedia, so I’m sorry.]

Asif: {long rambling question, basically “why do you take so long to put out stuff.”]

Martin: We’re perfectionists. We knew when we got out of the studio to go to Ozzfest [after mixing Nothing] we weren’t satisfied.

We wanted to remix it just for ourselves, and we did. But then when we heard it, we decided to make it a DVD, add stuff, and release it.

Asif: You’ve been going for another years, what keeps you going

Martin: Ourselves, It sounds arrogant, I think, when I hear myself saying that as if we don’t care about anything but what we do, but it’s not true. We listen to a lot of different groups. We grew up listening to stuff that influenced us tremendously. Both artists, writers, movies, whatever happens to be in your life.

Me and Tomas have know each other since we were six. Jens and Frederik have know each other since they were 12. We got together as a band when we were in our early twenties in the setting that we have now. We know each other fairly good. We groove together, and that, I think, is one of the reasons… First of all we’re stubborn , fucked-up, lazy-ass northern Swedes. We’re brought up in splendid isolation up in the north and cold, which means you develop your own ideas without taking a lot of influence from any music scenes. So what we do now is… life is more a part of the music, because whatever happens between albums in our lives is going to heavily influence what we do when we put something down.

You start with something, and that attracts you then everyone gets going, and we brainstorm until we’re done. You would probably be better [at] picking our influences than we would because it’s not a conscious process.

Asif: What do you think constitutes a progressive [album/group] these days? Because Meshuggah is unique, not straightforward. That’s why people like it.

Martin: Some advice I would like to give to a band -- or to anyone creative--- is to, when in doubt, listen to yourself. Because if you’re true to yourself, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks because you’re going to know that at least it’s the way you wanted it to be. If everyone else hated it… well, fuck all of them; I did my thing.

Rather than that doing it to make money or look good on that cover and come out being someone else, adjusting yourself and your creativity to what’s around than trying to make an impact. When people are trying to constrain themselves…. Say you are a painted, and you start painting something that‘s really cool, and then you say “ah, I don’t know where I’m at.” And you say “I saw this painting the other day, byt his really famous guy and he used this technique. It might work in my painting.” But it would be his technique in your painting So if you go, “I’ll leave it for a while. I’ll let it mature.” And then come back, it’s going to be better, or at least it’s going to be you.

Asif: Frederick has his solo albun, are you guys going to do any side projects?

Martin: No.

Asif: [some other question]

Martin:
First of all, we manage ourselves, we do everythings ourselves. We do the album art, the engineering, the merchandising, we record ourselves, we write ourselves. There’s nothing that’s not originally from us. The new cover was Tomas’s idea, and that we gave to another guy [who brought it to it’s realized form]. But we had a set idea of what it was going to be We’re really control freaks that way.

To be honest, we do [have other material Jens has stuff. I’ve got practically a whole album, but a lot of people say ‘re you going to use it?’ and I’m like ‘no.’

One of these days-- you never know-- I’m going to record it, mis it, master it, and see how it sounds.

If it satisfies me, I might release it in five years or something, but I’m going to work until I’m happy enough that I’ll listen to it when I sit down for a beer.

When people ask about side projects, it’s often about “what are you going to release?” Then we’re doing nothing. Frederick’s actually thinking about coming out with another album.

But about my own stuff, I think I’m going to record it with Frederick on drums and the song will be around bass {I think that’s what he said AWSOME!] and I’m going the guitars and vocals.

It’s going to be nice to do, because people are going to be pissed off that they can’t hear it.

Asif: What’s next for Meshuggah?

Martin: Touring. After that I’m going to stay home, then, late January, early February, we’re going to headline the States. Then we’ll see. Maybe a new album, maybe another tour, maybe a bit of album and new tour. Whatever comes along. It’s going to be a lot of work.

Asif: Last question: what’s the message to the fans?

Martin: (walks up to camera and whispers in an ominous, raspy voice) come see us live, come see us live, COME SEE US LIVE!


[thank you’s and ending stuff. I think I’m getting carpal tunnel and it’s easy to hear so hear it yourself]

[eegor]

Ah, thanks for the rough transcription. It helped a lot.

[Stealthtastic]

Originally Posted by TonalArchitect

If you don’t want to listen to the background noise, I’ve transcribed it to the best of my abilities. I left out the occasional like, um, or trailed off sentence that Martin or Asif used, but the important content should all be here. I altered slightly, paraphrased, and truncated some sentences, but the content should still be there. Sorry if I got something wrong.I also left out one section about touring and band mishaps, but these, I think, are all listed on Wikipedia, and I was getting tired.

Asif Salam: It’s been a long time since Meshuggah came to [the UK (?) Everyone’s kinda happy and we [hope to] get a good show. What do you think?

Martin: I hope so. [paraphrased here] It’s been a while since we’ve been in London.

Asif: How is the tour going so far, because you’ve got really good material.

Martin: It’s going good. This is the seventh show, I think. Since we released the album in March, we’ve been doing a U.S. tour with Ministry. And when we came back we did the first European run, and then we’ve been doing, like most bands, festivals throughout the summer. What’s happening now is we’re finishing up this [I’m not sure here] hopefully two and a half or three weeks into it it’ll be as good as it is now. We’re just like ‘look down the road.’ We’ve got Japan that’s coming up; we’ve got Australia coming up. We’re doing a lot of new territories this time. So it’s going to be fun.

Asif: There’s been a long gap between the releases of Nothing and Obzen, Was Obzen a more difficult album for the band?

Martin: Well, yes and no. Every album is a challenge in its own right. For the simple fact that whenever we come out of a recording, we look back as to whether we got a lot to do, you know, if it’s practical stuff coming off the road. But it’s not, it’s mostly a matter to sit back and listen to what comes naturally, Sometimes it’s swift, and sometimes it’s really slow, so it depends you know?

But this time around, it’s fairly safe to say that coming from Catch 33, which was this main, big, kind of a soundtrack-- nightmarish metal soundtrack-- having realized that we we’re coming out on the other side feeling really good about it, we felt that the most natural progression was to take a little bit of everything we’ve been doing (?) over the years and put it in a regular song format. So I would say that this time around we had a pretty good sense of purpose when we came into the writing process without being deliberate or anything.

But it depends very much on the project; there has to be one spark which gets the ball rolling and then everybody starts writing. On Catch 33, we were all within the studio, and we were writing on the same computer to make everything into one project.

This time, we were all sitting [in different rooms]. I was in my room, Tomas was in his room, Jens in his room. Dick was in Gothenberg, so he wasn’t actually around. But the thing was that when you go in between the rooms and listen to the other guys. It kind of self-feedbacks as far as inspiration goes, which helped a tremendous amount on this album.

Whenever you felt like “ahh… I’m spent,” you could kick back for a couple of hours and just walk around and listen to the other guys rooms. Hearing that stuff coming out makes you say “ah, I’ve gotta sit down and play.” Everyone was feeding off each other.

Asif: What is the meaning behind Obzen, and could you describe it as a concept did.

Martin: On a certain level, yes, but we never do concepts like Operation Mind[something]. You know, ‘here comes a guy and this is what happens.’ But there’s a general theme as far as the atmosphere goes. Catch 33 was very much an album about psychology, paradox. Whereas Obzen is a down-stated metaphorical statement of the state of humanity and society. And the world the way you see it from a[n outside] perspective.

It’s a play on words, “obscene” and “zen.” It really doesn’t allude to Zen Buddhism itself. But to look at humanity, it seems that we’re taking pride in being ‘we’re so great, we have all these technological achievements.’ We should be able to fight poverty , we should be able to fight disease, we should be able to fight this and that. And our leaders are standing there saying “oh yeah, we’re doing so much good for everybody, and we’re trying to get everybody along….’ This system they’ve put into effect has nothing to do with what we’re (they’re ?) saying.

It seems that Humanity has found its truest inner moment caked in blood, being driven by greed. We’re not saying that this is bad, but we’re talking about this paradox. That we perceive ourselves as being such high entities when we’re actually worse than most animals, which explains the album art. This guy is in a state of nirvana, but is covered in blood. Through the blood shed he’s reaching this nirvana.

Asif: Of course, all the review on Obzen have been great,. Everyone loved it. [this is hard to tell] Did you expect to create a great piece, or did the piece exceed your expectations?

Martin: That’s a tough one to answer. When we were younger, we read a lot more reviews. But then we realized a good review’s a good review; a bad review’s a bad review; but there’s nothing more to it, You could really feel bad about a really bad review and really good about a good review, but….It’s just an opinion,. But for sure it’s a lot more fun to get a good review than pummeled,

Every album is a surprise; you never know how people

Asif: are going to react to it….

Martin: Yeah. So most of the time-- luckily for us they’ve been good-- but sometimes you’ll read a review and they’ll say “I love it,” but they love it for completely different reasons than why we made it. So sometimes you read a reivew and are like “damn, this guy really gets it, “ and sometimes “this guy didn’t really get it,” but it doesn’t matter.

The interesting this about movies, music, art in general is the clash between the owner and the product. How people take something that you put out and did one thing with and made it something else through their impressions.

Asif: [I don’t know what this poorly-enunciating sonofabitch is saying, so I’m not going to write anything]

Martin: We’ve had our share of bad luck and we’ve had our share of bad timing.

[I’m sorry, this is touring stuff and I think I’m starting to get carpal tunnel, and I bet this same stuff is on Wikipedia, so I’m sorry.]

Asif: {long rambling question, basically “why do you take so long to put out stuff.”]

Martin: We’re perfectionists. We knew when we got out of the studio to go to Ozzfest [after mixing Nothing] we weren’t satisfied.

We wanted to remix it just for ourselves, and we did. But then when we heard it, we decided to make it a DVD, add stuff, and release it.

Asif: You’ve been going for another years, what keeps you going

Martin: Ourselves, It sounds arrogant, I think, when I hear myself saying that as if we don’t care about anything but what we do, but it’s not true. We listen to a lot of different groups. We grew up listening to stuff that influenced us tremendously. Both artists, writers, movies, whatever happens to be in your life.

Me and Tomas have know each other since we were six. Jens and Frederik have know each other since they were 12. We got together as a band when we were in our early twenties in the setting that we have now. We know each other fairly good. We groove together, and that, I think, is one of the reasons… First of all we’re stubborn , fucked-up, lazy-ass northern Swedes. We’re brought up in splendid isolation up in the north and cold, which means you develop your own ideas without taking a lot of influence from any music scenes. So what we do now is… life is more a part of the music, because whatever happens between albums in our lives is going to heavily influence what we do when we put something down.

You start with something, and that attracts you then everyone gets going, and we brainstorm until we’re done. You would probably be better [at] picking our influences than we would because it’s not a conscious process.

Asif: What do you think constitutes a progressive [album/group] these days? Because Meshuggah is unique, not straightforward. That’s why people like it.

Martin: Some advice I would like to give to a band -- or to anyone creative--- is to, when in doubt, listen to yourself. Because if you’re true to yourself, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks because you’re going to know that at least it’s the way you wanted it to be. If everyone else hated it… well, fuck all of them; I did my thing.

Rather than that doing it to make money or look good on that cover and come out being someone else, adjusting yourself and your creativity to what’s around than trying to make an impact. When people are trying to constrain themselves…. Say you are a painted, and you start painting something that‘s really cool, and then you say “ah, I don’t know where I’m at.” And you say “I saw this painting the other day, byt his really famous guy and he used this technique. It might work in my painting.” But it would be his technique in your painting So if you go, “I’ll leave it for a while. I’ll let it mature.” And then come back, it’s going to be better, or at least it’s going to be you.

Asif: Frederick has his solo albun, are you guys going to do any side projects?

Martin: No.

Asif: [some other question]

Martin:
First of all, we manage ourselves, we do everythings ourselves. We do the album art, the engineering, the merchandising, we record ourselves, we write ourselves. There’s nothing that’s not originally from us. The new cover was Tomas’s idea, and that we gave to another guy [who brought it to it’s realized form]. But we had a set idea of what it was going to be We’re really control freaks that way.

To be honest, we do [have other material Jens has stuff. I’ve got practically a whole album, but a lot of people say ‘re you going to use it?’ and I’m like ‘no.’

One of these days-- you never know-- I’m going to record it, mis it, master it, and see how it sounds.

If it satisfies me, I might release it in five years or something, but I’m going to work until I’m happy enough that I’ll listen to it when I sit down for a beer.

When people ask about side projects, it’s often about “what are you going to release?” Then we’re doing nothing. Frederick’s actually thinking about coming out with another album.

But about my own stuff, I think I’m going to record it with Frederick on drums and the song will be around bass {I think that’s what he said AWSOME!] and I’m going the guitars and vocals.

It’s going to be nice to do, because people are going to be pissed off that they can’t hear it.

Asif: What’s next for Meshuggah?

Martin: Touring. After that I’m going to stay home, then, late January, early February, we’re going to headline the States. Then we’ll see. Maybe a new album, maybe another tour, maybe a bit of album and new tour. Whatever comes along. It’s going to be a lot of work.

Asif: Last question: what’s the message to the fans?

Martin: (walks up to camera and whispers in an ominous, raspy voice) come see us live, come see us live, COME SEE US LIVE!


[thank you’s and ending stuff. I think I’m getting carpal tunnel and it’s easy to hear so hear it yourself]

Serious props to you man!

[All_¥our_Bass]

Pretty nice. Thx for typing it all out for us!!

[TomAwesome]

Yeah, thanks, Robert!

[Apophis]

thanks

[Pauly]

Another album from Freddy eh?!

[TonalArchitect]

You are all most welcome!

[daemon barbeque]

Originally Posted by TonalArchitect

If you don’t want to listen to the background noise, I’ve transcribed it to the best of my abilities. I left out the occasional like, um, or trailed off sentence that Martin or Asif used, but the important content should all be here. I altered slightly, paraphrased, and truncated some sentences, but the content should still be there. Sorry if I got something wrong.I also left out one section about touring and band mishaps, but these, I think, are all listed on Wikipedia, and I was getting tired.

Asif Salam: It’s been a long time since Meshuggah came to [the UK (?) Everyone’s kinda happy and we [hope to] get a good show. What do you think?

Martin: I hope so. [paraphrased here] It’s been a while since we’ve been in London.

Asif: How is the tour going so far, because you’ve got really good material.

Martin: It’s going good. This is the seventh show, I think. Since we released the album in March, we’ve been doing a U.S. tour with Ministry. And when we came back we did the first European run, and then we’ve been doing, like most bands, festivals throughout the summer. What’s happening now is we’re finishing up this [I’m not sure here] hopefully two and a half or three weeks into it it’ll be as good as it is now. We’re just like ‘look down the road.’ We’ve got Japan that’s coming up; we’ve got Australia coming up. We’re doing a lot of new territories this time. So it’s going to be fun.

Asif: There’s been a long gap between the releases of Nothing and Obzen, Was Obzen a more difficult album for the band?

Martin: Well, yes and no. Every album is a challenge in its own right. For the simple fact that whenever we come out of a recording, we look back as to whether we got a lot to do, you know, if it’s practical stuff coming off the road. But it’s not, it’s mostly a matter to sit back and listen to what comes naturally, Sometimes it’s swift, and sometimes it’s really slow, so it depends you know?

But this time around, it’s fairly safe to say that coming from Catch 33, which was this main, big, kind of a soundtrack-- nightmarish metal soundtrack-- having realized that we we’re coming out on the other side feeling really good about it, we felt that the most natural progression was to take a little bit of everything we’ve been doing (?) over the years and put it in a regular song format. So I would say that this time around we had a pretty good sense of purpose when we came into the writing process without being deliberate or anything.

But it depends very much on the project; there has to be one spark which gets the ball rolling and then everybody starts writing. On Catch 33, we were all within the studio, and we were writing on the same computer to make everything into one project.

This time, we were all sitting [in different rooms]. I was in my room, Tomas was in his room, Jens in his room. Dick was in Gothenberg, so he wasn’t actually around. But the thing was that when you go in between the rooms and listen to the other guys. It kind of self-feedbacks as far as inspiration goes, which helped a tremendous amount on this album.

Whenever you felt like “ahh… I’m spent,” you could kick back for a couple of hours and just walk around and listen to the other guys rooms. Hearing that stuff coming out makes you say “ah, I’ve gotta sit down and play.” Everyone was feeding off each other.

Asif: What is the meaning behind Obzen, and could you describe it as a concept did.

Martin: On a certain level, yes, but we never do concepts like Operation Mind[something]. You know, ‘here comes a guy and this is what happens.’ But there’s a general theme as far as the atmosphere goes. Catch 33 was very much an album about psychology, paradox. Whereas Obzen is a down-stated metaphorical statement of the state of humanity and society. And the world the way you see it from a[n outside] perspective.

It’s a play on words, “obscene” and “zen.” It really doesn’t allude to Zen Buddhism itself. But to look at humanity, it seems that we’re taking pride in being ‘we’re so great, we have all these technological achievements.’ We should be able to fight poverty , we should be able to fight disease, we should be able to fight this and that. And our leaders are standing there saying “oh yeah, we’re doing so much good for everybody, and we’re trying to get everybody along….’ This system they’ve put into effect has nothing to do with what we’re (they’re ?) saying.

It seems that Humanity has found its truest inner moment caked in blood, being driven by greed. We’re not saying that this is bad, but we’re talking about this paradox. That we perceive ourselves as being such high entities when we’re actually worse than most animals, which explains the album art. This guy is in a state of nirvana, but is covered in blood. Through the blood shed he’s reaching this nirvana.

Asif: Of course, all the review on Obzen have been great,. Everyone loved it. [this is hard to tell] Did you expect to create a great piece, or did the piece exceed your expectations?

Martin: That’s a tough one to answer. When we were younger, we read a lot more reviews. But then we realized a good review’s a good review; a bad review’s a bad review; but there’s nothing more to it, You could really feel bad about a really bad review and really good about a good review, but….It’s just an opinion,. But for sure it’s a lot more fun to get a good review than pummeled,

Every album is a surprise; you never know how people

Asif: are going to react to it….

Martin: Yeah. So most of the time-- luckily for us they’ve been good-- but sometimes you’ll read a review and they’ll say “I love it,” but they love it for completely different reasons than why we made it. So sometimes you read a reivew and are like “damn, this guy really gets it, “ and sometimes “this guy didn’t really get it,” but it doesn’t matter.

The interesting this about movies, music, art in general is the clash between the owner and the product. How people take something that you put out and did one thing with and made it something else through their impressions.

Asif: [I don’t know what this poorly-enunciating sonofabitch is saying, so I’m not going to write anything]

Martin: We’ve had our share of bad luck and we’ve had our share of bad timing.

[I’m sorry, this is touring stuff and I think I’m starting to get carpal tunnel, and I bet this same stuff is on Wikipedia, so I’m sorry.]

Asif: {long rambling question, basically “why do you take so long to put out stuff.”]

Martin: We’re perfectionists. We knew when we got out of the studio to go to Ozzfest [after mixing Nothing] we weren’t satisfied.

We wanted to remix it just for ourselves, and we did. But then when we heard it, we decided to make it a DVD, add stuff, and release it.

Asif: You’ve been going for another years, what keeps you going

Martin: Ourselves, It sounds arrogant, I think, when I hear myself saying that as if we don’t care about anything but what we do, but it’s not true. We listen to a lot of different groups. We grew up listening to stuff that influenced us tremendously. Both artists, writers, movies, whatever happens to be in your life.

Me and Tomas have know each other since we were six. Jens and Frederik have know each other since they were 12. We got together as a band when we were in our early twenties in the setting that we have now. We know each other fairly good. We groove together, and that, I think, is one of the reasons… First of all we’re stubborn , fucked-up, lazy-ass northern Swedes. We’re brought up in splendid isolation up in the north and cold, which means you develop your own ideas without taking a lot of influence from any music scenes. So what we do now is… life is more a part of the music, because whatever happens between albums in our lives is going to heavily influence what we do when we put something down.

You start with something, and that attracts you then everyone gets going, and we brainstorm until we’re done. You would probably be better [at] picking our influences than we would because it’s not a conscious process.

Asif: What do you think constitutes a progressive [album/group] these days? Because Meshuggah is unique, not straightforward. That’s why people like it.

Martin: Some advice I would like to give to a band -- or to anyone creative--- is to, when in doubt, listen to yourself. Because if you’re true to yourself, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks because you’re going to know that at least it’s the way you wanted it to be. If everyone else hated it… well, fuck all of them; I did my thing.

Rather than that doing it to make money or look good on that cover and come out being someone else, adjusting yourself and your creativity to what’s around than trying to make an impact. When people are trying to constrain themselves…. Say you are a painted, and you start painting something that‘s really cool, and then you say “ah, I don’t know where I’m at.” And you say “I saw this painting the other day, byt his really famous guy and he used this technique. It might work in my painting.” But it would be his technique in your painting So if you go, “I’ll leave it for a while. I’ll let it mature.” And then come back, it’s going to be better, or at least it’s going to be you.

Asif: Frederick has his solo albun, are you guys going to do any side projects?

Martin: No.

Asif: [some other question]

Martin:
First of all, we manage ourselves, we do everythings ourselves. We do the album art, the engineering, the merchandising, we record ourselves, we write ourselves. There’s nothing that’s not originally from us. The new cover was Tomas’s idea, and that we gave to another guy [who brought it to it’s realized form]. But we had a set idea of what it was going to be We’re really control freaks that way.

To be honest, we do [have other material Jens has stuff. I’ve got practically a whole album, but a lot of people say ‘re you going to use it?’ and I’m like ‘no.’

One of these days-- you never know-- I’m going to record it, mis it, master it, and see how it sounds.

If it satisfies me, I might release it in five years or something, but I’m going to work until I’m happy enough that I’ll listen to it when I sit down for a beer.

When people ask about side projects, it’s often about “what are you going to release?” Then we’re doing nothing. Frederick’s actually thinking about coming out with another album.

But about my own stuff, I think I’m going to record it with Frederick on drums and the song will be around bass {I think that’s what he said AWSOME!] and I’m going the guitars and vocals.

It’s going to be nice to do, because people are going to be pissed off that they can’t hear it.

Asif: What’s next for Meshuggah?

Martin: Touring. After that I’m going to stay home, then, late January, early February, we’re going to headline the States. Then we’ll see. Maybe a new album, maybe another tour, maybe a bit of album and new tour. Whatever comes along. It’s going to be a lot of work.

Asif: Last question: what’s the message to the fans?

Martin: (walks up to camera and whispers in an ominous, raspy voice) come see us live, come see us live, COME SEE US LIVE!


[thank you’s and ending stuff. I think I’m getting carpal tunnel and it’s easy to hear so hear it yourself]

[Durero]

That was cool - just watched the whole thing with headphones on - it was pretty easy to make out everything Martin said.