Meshuggah
Chaosphere (Nuclear Blast)
An interview with drummer Gustaf Hielm
by Scott Hefflon
Chaosphere is your first full-length in three years, why so long?
It’s not that it took us three years to make the record, but there were many other things happening. Fredrik (guitar) was working on his solo album, and that took about a year and a half; and then we all moved to Stockholm from way up North, so that took another half year…
Why did you move?
We had many problems with our management, due to their being in Stockholm and us being 600 kilometers away, about a ten hour drive. The topography of Sweden is such that the roads are like whiplash, all these curly roads, there is no direct route from one place to another. Stockholm is the capital of Sweden, but it is still small – there are only a little over a million inhabitants.
Do you see the move affecting your music?
It has affected our writing because we don’t live as close together as we used to. We tend to sit at home and write individually nowadays. We have computers and home studios, and then we send more or less finished songs to each other in MP3 files. We learn all our riffs at home so when we meet in rehearsal, we don’t have to take that much time learning riffs, we play them together and work on the song as a whole.
Do you guys email your songs? Doesn’t that take forever?
Actually, we do email the songs, and yes, it does take forever.
How big are the files?
They can be up to about 4 megs.
Jamming and brainstorming isn’t really a group experience anymore, huh?
Not really, but it’s cool because we can sit at home and evaluate the songs without the pressure. You can play around with the riffs and add your own ideas as they come up instead of being limited to what happens in the rehearsal room.
Of the three years since your last album, not counting The True Human Design EP, how much time was spent writing and recording Chaosphere?
We made this album from scratch in three months – both songwriting and recording. As I said, Fredrik was working on his solo album, so we didn’t have any old riffs kicking around. We ditched a few songs because we weren’t satisfied with them yet, but Nuclear Blast was on our backs to release something. While we do like to have extra time to work on arranging, I don’t think that if we’d taken the time, the album would be significantly better.
If you’re given more time, you just take longer to do roughly the same thing.
Yes, we are actually quite lazy.
You guys seem to like EPs between full-lengths, which is good because it takes you so long to release full-lengths. The True Human Design (’97) has a song, “Sane” that appears on Chaosphere – is it the exact same version?
No, it’s been re-recorded. It’s not really different, except for the guitar solo.
I love the version of “Future Breed Machine” called “Futile Bread Machine (Campfire Version).” All that weird electronic stuff, just goofing around, is absolute genius! What’s the song at the end of Chaosphere?
At the end of “Elastic,” we were supposed to have a fade-out of the song during the strange part, but Fredrik left his guitar on and it started to feedback in an old ADA delay, feedbacking internally, so when we started to mix the album, we decided to leave it in. At the end of the album, we wanted to end with some kind of statement, so we put four songs on top of each other. We had fun when we did it, but I don’t think a lot of people find it fun to listen to. I think it’s a combination of “Concatenation,” “The Mouth Licking What You’ve Bled,” “New Millennium Cyanide Christ” and some other song.
Is there any rhyme or reason to it, or is it just four songs from beginning to end?
It’s just four songs. The funny part is, all the guitar solos seem to start at the same time in all the different songs. For some reason…
What’s that mean?
It means we wrote the same fucking song four times.
Do you write any of the lyrics?
No, with the exception of one that Marten (guitars) wrote, they’re all written by Tomas (drums). It’s been that way since the None album.
One thing that’s really hard to put into words is how Jens’ vocals are not as much about notes as they are about beats. It’s not so much a melody as it is an additional percussion line. Similar to the guitars and bass that stutter and chop and do the start/stop thing, it’s less about notes than it is about attack.
Peter Svensen, guitarist for the Cardigans, once said that vocals weren’t the primary part of the song in metal anymore, it’s more the riffs, and the vocals are merely the verbal expression. We’ve been criticized for letting Jens’ vocals be so “one-dimensional,” but the music itself is quite one-dimensional. That’s why his singing is somewhat monotone. The songs as a whole are binary – it’s either on or it’s off. And it switches rapidly between them.
When preparing for this interview, I realized the one question I had to ask you about the music was how Meshuggah, like many, many other “new metal” bands, does the start/stop, on/off, stuttering guitar, and yet your songs don’t all blend together…
I’m afraid I haven’t got a clue. A guess might be that we play quite polyrhythmically, but with a steady 4×4 beat. We loop odd-metered patterns over a 4×4 beat, and then we start over again.
Do you ever want to write really melodic powermetal, like Iron Maiden or something, but find you can’t within the context of Meshuggah?
No, not really. If we wanted to do it, we would, but we like the binary style.
Do you ever slip melodic chord progressions into your songs?
Maybe sometimes live, when we’re a little bit sloppy.
You seem to have no interest in holding chords – you want to pick it, mute it, and move on.
Right.
Hated Question: What are your influences and/or what bands do you like?
This is where I mumble for five minutes before saying Strapping Young Lad.
How about Pantera, Fear Factory, and Machine Head, who you’ve toured with?
I like Pantera’s songwriting, but I don’t think any of us listen to them, so I wouldn’t say they’re an influence. I joined the band after the tour with Machine Head, but we’re friends. I’ve never met Fear Factory so I couldn’t say.
So what bands do you wanna play with?
Again, Strapping Young Lad, and there’s a band from New Jersey who opened for us in New York, Dillinger Escape Plan, we think they’re an excellent band. That would be a good package because we have the same goals – we like to play good, aggressive music, have fun, freak out and be silly. To be silly on stage is a major priority for us.
And Devin from Strapping is a producer as well. And the crisp, lightning bolt attack of both bands is, in a way, what many new metal bands aspire to.
While we produce our music, we have to give a lot of credit to Daniel Bergstrand. We recorded both Destroy, Erase, Improve and Chaosphere with him, and he recorded Strapping Young Lad’s City, too.
It might seem strange to some that you guys like to have fun on stage and be kinda goofy… This is extreme music, after all.
We’re kind of misplaced, really, because we take our music very seriously, but when we’re on stage, we don’t have the need to be destructive or hostile. We like to have fun and act silly, and most places we play, the audience doesn’t mind that we act out like complete nerds.
Do you take any shit from metalheads who want you to be angry all the time and not goof around?
We haven’t had any problems, really. But Fredrik did get email from some guy who’d seen him do “the face” – the look of someone who’s just pulled their fist out of their asshole – and the guy said he didn’t want to listen to our music anymore because Fredrik looked like a complete buffoon when he makes that face. And he makes that face all the time.
Do you guys ever play cover songs?
If we did, it would have to be a very bad band. On a recent tour in Scandinavia, we did a song by a band called Whimsy, of all things. They’re a Swedish band who’s been around for ten or fifteen tears, but they still don’t know how to play. They write songs like, “Attacked by a Shark,” “Raper,” and “Vampire” – songs that you write when you’re very young, but these guys are in their mid-30s. When we played their hometown, we played their song, “Attacked by a Shark,” and we invited them up on stage with us.
How did they respond?
They were on cloud nine.
They didn’t realize you were making fun of them?
No, not at all. I have to tell you this… Their bass player’s name is “Dagger,” and he wears skin-tight leather pants, a leather vest, and bathing shoes. You might call them “flip-flops.”
(PO Box 43618 Philadelphia, PA 19106)
