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🎧 Novidade: “Soliloquy” dos tētēma a.k.a. Mike Patton & Anthony Pateras 🦇

💿 necroscape via Ipecac Recordings🦞

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Album Review: tētēma – Necroscape

https://music.mxdwn.com/2020/04/16/reviews/album-review-tetema-necroscape/

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tētēma Interview: Reforming Raw Materials

Photo by Sabina Maselli

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Earlier this month, the project of Mike Patton (Faith No More, Dead Cross) and composer Anthony Pateras returned. tētēma’s new Necroscape follows 2014′s Geocidal and is even more aesthetically all over the place than that one. With violinist Erkki Veltheim and drummer Will Guthrie, the now-quartet combines Patton’s solemn-to-chaotic vocal arrangements (the title track, “Cutlass Eye”, “Dead Still”) with Pateras’ synth-heavy ambiance (“Wailt Till Mornin’”). But equally impressive are Guthrie’s percussive blasts (“Haunted On The Uptake”, buchla jam “Soliloquy”, the clattering “Flatliner’s Owl”), while Veltheim’s strings are ever present and all-encompassing.

Writing over email in lockdown, Pateras answered some questions about Necroscape; read his responses below.

Since I Left You: How have you been holding up?

Anthony Pateras: OK. I’ve been gardening and woodshedding on the piano to weather the lockdown.

SILY: What do you feel is the main difference between Necroscape and Geocidal?

AP: I feel Necroscape is much more concise and focused. Geocidal was a sprawling, chaotic affair that snapped into focus all of a sudden. Also, Necroscape is more or less a 4-piece band record, whereas Geocidal was more about creating a miniature orchestra around the voice with some of my favorite musicians.

SILY: Many of the tracks on Necroscape, like "Cutlass Eye", are 'heavier' than anything on Geocidal. They've got screaming, blast beats, and other things associated with punk or metal-adjacent genres and sub-genres. What contributed to this aesthetic shift?

AP: Wow, I guess I don’t hear any blast beats on there, nor punk or metal. Mike did mention at one point early on he’d just done the Dead Cross record and thought that had influenced “Cutlass Eye”. To me, this is one big musique concrète piece.

SILY: A track like "Haunted On The Uptake" combines very localized sounds with global pop structures. Is that a balance you consciously try to achieve when writing/recording the band's music?

AP: By localized sounds, I guess you mean close-miked? With this record, loosely speaking, I wanted to create song structures out of sounds that perhaps normally weren’t used in songs so often. So using specialized sounds is all part of that objective.

SILY: Are the vocals in "Dead Still" higher in the mix because the song has a more concrete message you felt needed to be heard?

AP: There is no message in that song. Making a record entails incorporating all kinds of flavors and perspectives. If each track has exactly the same sound stage and relationship between the parts, the ear gets fatigued very quickly and I wind up a very bored listener.

SILY: What about the title track made you want to name the album after it? Why did it make for a good opener?

AP: The album title came before the track title; then, when it came to lyrics we agreed that title somehow suited that track. As far as openers go, I wanted to do something quite understated and mysterious, not have this thing of the soft track or interlude in the middle of the record. I was trying to be a bit more structurally bold this time around, not come out with all guns blazing.

SILY: Why did you want to close the album with a track in Italian [ “Funerale Di Un Contadino”]?

AP: That was a last minute call. It’s a live recording from our show at MOFO [MONA FOMA/Museum of Old and New Art: Festival Of Music and Art] in 2017, which was a cover we worked up for that occasion. It’s from an amazing album from 1970 called Per un Pugno di Samba, a collaboration between Ennio Morricone and Chico Buraque, who is Brazilian but sings in Italian here. Freaking mind blowing album.

SILY: What's the inspiration behind the sequencing of the album?

AP: Nothing specific, sequencing for me comes down to how the album functions as a whole and how it can be used to enhance a universal structure between songs. I personally think it’s a great shame that people don’t do ‘albums’ so much anymore as listeners, whereas I’m a big fan of that. A long-range landscape or idea to get stuck into can be very nourishing. A group of disconnected tracks [can], too, but everything feels so fragmented now I like to try and hold attention for longer.

SILY: Many of your key track descriptions almost read like music reviews, combining disparate references to describe and aesthetic. Do you think taking in Necroscape requires this type of context?

AP: No, I don’t. I wrote those because the label asked me to and because it was a fun contextual exercise. The references to me don’t feel disparate, and I feel the music is pretty straightforward and can be absorbed as such.

SILY: What's the inspiration behind the album art?

AP: The album art is from a couple of exhibitions by an amazing Australian artist called Talitha Kennedy. I met her in Sydney when I started work on this album. One night we were drinking wine at her place surrounded by all of these striking leather sculptures and they stayed with me until 4 years later when it was time to sort out the artwork.

SILY: Are there or were there any plans to perform these new tracks live?

AP: Maybe! Now with the pandemic, it's hard to plan anything involving live music. All of my touring has been cancelled for 6 months, for example.

SILY: What's next for you?

AP: I’m composing a bunch of abstract electro-acoustic concert works which specifically interrogate direct compositional relationships between rhythm, timbre, and space.

SILY: Is there anything you've been listening to, reading, or watching that's caught your attention, inspired you, comforted you, or moved you, either before or during social distancing?

AP: I’ve been revisiting the composer Conlon Nancarrow’s Player Piano Studies, music which I studied many years ago. To put it mildly, it’s some of the most brilliant and astonishing music ever conceived for any instrument. He wrote them in complete isolation in Mexico after relocating there from the US. I guess my feeling is, if Nancarrow can sit completely isolated for over 40 years and make incredible music that no one else could possibly do, the best use of my time right now is to go deep and try to follow his example, at least for a couple of months! The last thing I want to be doing is making internet broadcasts; I feel a positive side to all of this could be artists taking the time to deepen their practice and come out the other end with something really special to share.

necroscape by tetema

tētēma, featuring Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle) and Anthony Pateras, return with their sophomore album, Necroscape.

#tetema album #tetema #Mike Patton #Anthony Pateras #Necroscape #Press Release #Speakeasy PR #Burning Hot Events