~INTERVIEWS~
Devin Townsend
I'm getting quite used to hearing Devin Townsend's Canadian accent over a crystal-clear satellite link. This is the third interview I've done with him in the last six months. He actually remembers who I am this time, which is a first for any musician dealing with an otherwise anonymous voice down the other end of an international phone link. These previous interviews dealt with Strapping Young Lad, the band he's most often associated with, an extreme experi-metal act with both a monster sound and a self-depricating sense of humor. He often alluded to Ocean Machine, his other band, and a new project called Infinity. Admittedly, Devin's description of Infinity had me worried. Had this crazed genius finally gone over the edge? He described it as over the top, self-indulgent and ridiculous. So, several months later I find a copy of Infinity in my pigeonhole at the Beat office. On the cover there is a picture of a naked, balding man with the word "Canada" tattooed on his right leg. I assume this is Devin himself, but I'm not sure because the photos in his press kit feature a man with enough hair for two four-piece metal bands.
"That ugly, balding little troll? Yeah, that's me, hi!" Townsend says. "My hair's floating in the toilet somewhere..."
Infinity represents a grandiose vision for Devin but is solidly based in his personal life. He's 26 now and has been through the early life crisis that the mid-20s entails. "Each record I do sums up phases in my life, and Infinity sums up a particularly hard one. You grow up and it's crazy, man, because I didn't think it would ever happen to me. All life's phases offer their own bitch parts. The change from a kid to being a man - as much as you like to think that doesn't really work that way anymore. As a kid you can get away with a lot of shit because you don't think you're accountable but when you hit this other age it's like 'Oh God, I've got rent to pay and a future to think about,' and if you let your guard down for even a minute it just gets out of control, aaaaaaahhh!"
Infinity is a mammoth project, driven by a barrage of synths, huge pools of effects and real choirs, half inspired by Townsend's heavy metal adolescence and his obsession with composers like Stravinsky. It could have easily been a folly, but it's so different to almost everything out there at the moment that it's likely to create interest from more than just the metal world.
"It was ridiculous, man," Townsend says of his studio schedule for the project. "Day-in, day-out. I spent ridiculous amounts of hours trying to make it happen. This one was particularly a bitch to get done. The next one won't be as hard as this one - it was just brutal. It makes it a bit more difficult on one level because I'm always having to live up to this expectation that's in my head of what the song has to sound like. I prefer to think of myself as someone who composes music rather than hacks it out like just another moron but it's up to another person to figure it out."
Infinity features an almost glassy, synthesizer-like guitar tone, something that the proliferation of grunge and grind in the metal world largely killed off as a trend. The tone is produced by layering distortion, chorus and delay effects. This sound is an 80s shred hallmark which is also utilised in a lot of doom metal, its very funereal. Townsend's use of this tone is both jarring and soothing, using the choral quality of layered effects with more originality than his predecessors.
"It all happened because I listened to Judas Priest a bit too much when I was a kid when they were making little synthy guitar tracks. The difference between me and other people who 'compose' is that I don't know what I'm doing. A lot of people know what they're doing and go in the direction that technique has provided for them. I go purely in the direction that I hear in my head."
"If I thought Infinity was too indulgent I wouldn't do it, and anybody who doesn't like it, that's fine - go listen to something else. I do what I want to do because it's what I want to do. There's no hidden agenda - I'm not a musician for anybody other than myself. Music just comes out and it's as indulgent as all get-out but that's fine with me. The thing with Infinity is that it's such a tense-sounding record. There's not a whole lot of relaxation going on there. The record was made from the headspace that I wanted everything on ten all the time. The idea was to have a real compositional sense to it but to have everything going all the time. Even if it was a mellow thing I wanted tonnes of mellow things going on at the same time till there was so much chaos that it was hard to listen to and not get confused. I just wanted clusters of sound."
By David Trethewie
Beat Magazine,
Feb. 10th 1999