One of the more promising metal bands from the UK is London-based Talanas. Mat Davies sat down with guitarist/vocalist Hal Sinden to discuss every Talanas, his appreciation for the finer things in life and Keira Knightley..
Thank you for taking the time to talk to Ghost Cult. How pleased are you with how Corpseflower has turned out?
Thank you for posing the questions! Nice bow tie, by the way. We’re very pleased with ‘corpseflower’ indeed. The best analogy I can provide is that it’s something of an unexpected pregnancy (but please don’t say we were looking a bit fat) as we were leading up in the long term for the next full length album, ‘daylight’ and attempted to record some of the songs we’d written already to see how they gelled as listenable tracks; suddenly we realised that we had a ‘happy accident’ on our hands – some pretty good sounding recordings and a full European tour with My Dying Bride through which finally we could provide a vinyl release that we’ve had people asking us about for a good while now.
Something I always find really interesting is how releases really take on their own distinct character soon after you’ve recorded them. ‘corpseflower’ is, in many respects, a preview of the next album since we’ll re-record both songs when we come to track ‘daylight’, but as two standalone tracks they’ve already adopted their own atmosphere. I feel they represent where we now are as a band, in that we’re capable of writing in quite different styles.
How would you describe your music to someone who was coming to you for the very first time?
Different people outside the band have used some really interesting similes or comparative anchors to describe talanas since we formed in 2008, some fair and others shy of the mark in my opinion. I’d say my absolute favourite has to be ‘death metal’s gentlemen’ which I was quietly really honoured by, plus I also think it carries with it a certain level of association for what the music might be like to the untrained ear.
When I’m asked, I’ve found it’s typically easier just to say “metal” as it’s rare that people don’t pull a face when presented with “progressive death metal” as a label. I wouldn’t really say that we’re exclusively death metal, certainly not at this stage anyway, but if anything it’s that we perform extreme music with a slightly more refined slant to it. It’s the product of four people who are as in love with the kind of dark 80s pop & avant-garde music they were brought up on as much as some of the most brutal or technical death metal around today.
Some European & American publications wanted to class us as gothic metal which really doesn’t sit well with me at all. I mean, yes, we dress in shirts etc. but none of it is period clothing and we DEFINITELY don’t write about or suggest that we’re vampires or anything else as thunderously daft, thank heavens. I read a comment on an American forum that suggested we were “what would happen if Akercocke wrote a second Words That Go Unspoken, Deeds That Go Undone” which is one hell of a lofty suggestion but I reckon we’ve come a long way and developed our sound quite a bit since we were last officially described as being much like Akercocke. With that said, that does tend to be quickest knee-jerk comparison that people make when they hear our earlier material and we’d be lying if we said we weren’t influenced by them in some way when we started up.
For now, let’s just say that Talanas sounds like what would probably happen if Morbid Angel got a lift to Glyndebourne in Fields Of The Nephilim’s passion wagon and were involved in a high speed road collision with a Savile Row tailor’s van and a lorry carrying a caseload of Fortnum & Mason’s bergamot-smoked Earl Grey loose leaf tea.
Can you take us through the creative process that you go through: how do you bring together your ideas, inspirations and thought processes into the artistic whole that is evident on the record?
We’ve changed our approaches to writing quite a lot over the years. We used not to ‘jam’ at all and I still find the term quite strange since it makes me think of a kind of pub rock setting (ie. living hell), but in the past it would sometimes be a case of me & Ewan [guitar] presenting a nearly finished song to Duff [bass] & Joe [drums] which they’d essentially learn whilst adding minor embellishments here and there. We didn’t really know any different but I think we were all aware that that seemed quite unfairly balanced insofar as creativity is concerned.
For the past year or so we’ve definitely been writing as a band a lot more. Whilst I’d still say that the core ideas come from both Ewan & myself, more often than not we’re adamant about working on them as a complete unit from a point of absolute rawness to see if the initial ideas themselves actually gel from the get-go, rather than trying to squeeze out an end product that’s not unanimously clear to all involved.
Speaking personally, as the ‘other half’ of the guitar contingent in talanas, I rarely write with my guitar to hand but tend to come up with theories of how I’d like a song to sound, I only approach the instrument much later in the process which usually then changes the end result quite a bit in that transition. Ewan & I do write a lot together, in person, and he’s an incredibly adept guitarist who’s capable of translating whatever is going on in his head very immediately to the fretboard which I think provides an important and alternative angle to the way I attack the creative process. When he & I come to present these raw ideas to the rest of the band, usually Joe will take an idea and run with it to a place that none of us will have expected, which is the benefit of having a drummer with such an enormous kit who’s actually capable of using it so succinctly. Similarly, Duff has just got himself a fretless seven string and that’s already started to alter our sound, so his role is considerably more pronounced.
When it comes to thematic inspiration, as the lyricist of the band I’m terribly guilty of getting ahead of myself. For me, I really need to have an angle on the entire colour of a project to be able to write within it and to work sympathetically with its general feel. I’m extremely lucky to be in a band with people who not only allow me to get a bit tied up in these sorts of areas but who actually tend to arrive at similar conclusions themselves with what each album or body of work’s character is to be. For instance, with the album we’re writing now we all came to an agreement over the title & colour of the piece pretty early on which then allowed me to put myself in the right mindset to consider the songs and the message that each would convey.
I’m guilty of brooding on things. It would seem that it takes a fair while for me to work an emotion out and there are definitely certain subjects that have caused me a lot of hurt that I’m yet to exorcise fully through the medium of song. I suppose one could say that it’s an addictive thing to keep picking at wounds but there are definitely areas of my life that I wish I could ‘put to bed’ (which, ironically, is where most came from in the first place) and that keep re-surfacing, much to my chagrin. Whilst there are occasionally songs that I’ve written from a removed perspective, for the most part I tend to write about things that I’m unsettled about that have appeared as an unwelcome visitor in my head – thoughts that have surprised or even at times disgusted me which mould into the shape of characters that allow me to write from their perspective. ‘beloved whore’ is definitely one of those moments.
I think I can safely say that my points of inspirations are almost entirely pastoral. There’s nothing about living in the city that inspires me whatsoever. It’s obviously fantastic for business and socialising – living in Camden Town, I adore being this close to everything, but I come from the middle of nowhere (the Romney Marshes) in Kent and I start to get a bit edgy if I don’t get down there often. As such, I’m not really concerned with writing about contemporaneous social issues and tend to leave it to other bands to write about political, modern or urbane subjects for the most part. It’s important to play to your strengths and my political outlook doesn’t really lend itself to the current fashion of being angrily socialist etc.
What have been the high points and low points of being in the band so far?
By far the best part of being in talanas so far has been the camaraderie. No matter what happens to us, we’ve managed to maintain a very tight unit of solid, familial understanding and communication which I’ll be completely honest and say that I’ve never had before in a band. We formed on September 5th 2008, and ever since then I’ve left each writing session, meeting or rehearsal feeling genuinely excited to be part of it, and I can be a bit of a simpering bundle of fawning sentimentality whenever I come home from having created things with the rest of the guys.
On the exterior, what I love from it so much is that I’m given a chance to present the kind of music I want, in the manner I want, to people who seem to want it. It’s such an incredible privilege to have people receive your art positively and be eager for more and, again, I’ve never had it happen this well in any other creative venture that I’ve worked in. In absolute awareness of the ego-centricity of such a statement; one of the most crucial aspects of being a musician who writes & releases original material is that you get to leave your mark on the world – these albums will outlive me, in one form or another, and as an atheist I think that’s the closest we can ever get to some wisp of immortality. The other aspect is live performance; there is honestly nothing that compares with the feeling of mutual communication that can be experienced with an appreciative crowd in a good venue. For me, that’s my adventure sport.
There are unfortunately low points, but thankfully none that relate to our relationships within the band itself. It’s hard for anyone to disagree that the music industry is in a pretty sorry state now and has absolutely failed to weather the storm of the business model change brought about by the digital revolution, but then this is just the problem; the revolution has served only one portion of its participants, in that the supposed ‘power’ has most certainly been siphoned off or away from the larger companies / multinationals and has to some extent cut down exploitation from a corporate level yet I feel we’re a long way from artists themselves benefitting in the way they really should. Sure, there’s more creative freedom when not tied down to profit structure or shareholder value but there’s still this enormous gulf that’s missing when it comes to funding a recording, promoting it and eventually touring the material.
The fact is, being in a band is *extremely* expensive. I’m not in this for the profit and am happy to continue working in unrelated fields to generate income and creating art in my spare time, but I’m consistently and regularly surprised to find people approaching me (even those in the same industry!) who are under the mistaken assumption that we generate disposable income through talanas and can afford to work at it full-time. Each of us has a day job. Whilst in some senses it’s never been easier to self produce your own material, we have a very specific and extremely clear production sound that absolutely cannot be generated with a home studio setup, so it means that we rely on professional producers & studio time which is no cheaper now than it was before the digital revolution. These days technically anyone can record and release an album from their bedroom with pirated software and a little net savvy, but it takes capital to sound professional and to be taken seriously by your peers and the press, above being perceived as a demo band.
What ambitions do you have for the band? is there a grand masterplan or is the approach more organic?
I wouldn’t say that we’ve plotted things out in any specific way, but I’m fairly sure each band member in talanas has their own strong suspicion of where things may lead. The importance of that is that each individual angle on our long term plan will differ slightly from the next and therefore promote the diversity of the outcome. Similarly, each time we plan and then write a record it almost always turns out differently than expected, so it’s tricky to say with any accuracy what we’ll be doing or how we’ll be sounding in however many years time, but then that’s part of the magic of doing all this.
Speaking personally, what I’d love to be able to do with talanas is to introduce more experimental or unexpected angles to the sound and yet not have it perceived as being awkward or in some way heretical. Whilst I wouldn’t say extreme music necessarily shuns experimentation or innovation, at times I feel that there’s a slight polarisation with respect to the position that any experimental band holds, a bit like “right, if you want to do that then fine, but don’t think you can back here and play metal normally as well as all that weird stuff.”.
With the prevalence of new art and the increasing ease of its availability, I really feel very strongly that as a listener you just can’t afford to tie yourself exclusively to one specific sub-genre and be xenophobic towards other sounds or derivations of style. To that extent, I also feel that bands should embrace this approach as well. I think it’s a bit weird that there are still specific charts for specific musical categories as it promotes a “them and us” mentality amongst audiences and industry. I’d be very happy to hear a band like Muse take a stab at blast beats if it meant that acts like Katatonia, Tesseract and Anathema could likewise finally get recognised by the more indie-based crowds and magazines for the diversity and accessibility of their sound. If the mould is too firmly set with these sort of acts then perhaps talanas could do something to further the cause and weed out the last of the mainstream press who still write about metal bands as if they’re reactionary, luddite meatheads.
From a more practical level, a major ambition would be to have this all pay for itself. Currently, and this is certainly the most applicable in the UK, pretty much every time anyone sees us onstage it’ll be at a not inconsiderable personal cost to each band member. The same applies, but at a much larger scale, for any recording (we’re talking many, many thousands of pounds) that you can hear of our work. Ultimately, that goal will take a major upheaval from within the music industry itself as the golden goose is very much yet to lay its egg in that regard. My biggest hope is that we’ll still be active and relevant to our audiences by that time that comes about so that we can actually present our art with the kind of sheen and clarity that we feel would suit it best.
What’s next on the agenda for you?
Lunch. With Sasha Grey and Keira Knightley. (please).
We’re really looking forward to working on a video for ‘corpseflower’, and we’re *extremely* excited to confirm that we’ll be teaming up again with Greg Barnes of ClingFilms (the Director of ‘antiphon’) as we really felt very comfortable with him at the helm last time and with the end result. With any luck, we’ll shoot that over the next month or two.
We’ve had a few rumblings thrown our way towards potential touring again, specifically overseas, perhaps farther afield than we’ve been before but we’re also keen to concentrate on getting this next album down since we definitely reached a point of technical prowess on the My Dying Bride tour in December from playing every night as a band.
There’s something of a plan to see about where we can take Eulogy Media (our self-run label) in respect of potential partnership, all in relation to the next album. As a band we’re very conscious of working towards furthering new angles of business as much as possible and we’re optimistic enough to hope that we might stumble across a new approach that might bring about greater synchronicity between artist and consumer.
What other bands/artists have you been taking inspiration/ enjoyment from of late?
Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Nik Bärtsch, in particular his Ronin movements. It took me absolutely by surprise as I’d really not expected to have much fondness for anything so minimalistic, but it’s so incredibly well performed and considered. To be honest, quite a lot of the artists on ECM are excellent.
A friend put me on to The Old Dance School who I’ve developed a proper soft spot for when they hit their instrumental material, I was also quite pleasantly taken aback by the most recent Mumford & Sons album ‘Babel’ since I’d not really been a fan of their previous work. Stellamara manage to hit the right spot for me with the more Eastern slants, I’ve found pretty much all of their material to be of an admirably high quality. Consistent brilliance is also coming out of acts such as The Eden House and Evi Vine.
My mainstays for the past two or so years though have definitely been WovenHand, Esben and the Witch and 2:54. I’d safely say they’re my strongest influences at the moment and everything that each act has released recently has struck very heavy chords with me in different ways.
The UK music scene seems to be going from strength to strength at the moment. Who else- apart from talanas, of course- should readers of Ghost Cult look out for?
I’m going to put my neck on the line and say that I actually think the UK scene can be a little disparate at times lately. I’m not into apportioning blame for such things, but I do feel that the relations between artist and audience are nowhere near as strong and supportive as they were back in the heyday of the 90s UKDM scene etc.
With that said, there are some truly astonishing English bands around at the moment who not that many people may have heard of:
Spires: We’ve toured with them twice now and they’re just such a dependably professional band to experience, live. Honestly, there were times when we were shocked at how consistent they were onstage. We have some excellent video footage of some of their soloing which really needs to be seen to be believed.
Agonyst: Why aren’t this band huge already? It defies belief. They played with us in Colchester & Southampton on the last UK tour and damn near blew us off the stage both times. Total progressive insanity, manic shredding, utterly mental vocals and some of the funniest fuckers you’ll hear take to a microphone in a good while. I’ve heard some of their new material and it’s incredible.
Rannoch: Unsung heroes, in my opinion. They’re just great performers, tight as a nut and blissfully innovative with 8 string guitars. Don’t expect yer standard 3 fret djent bro-downs with these chaps, they use the full range and do it bloody well, plus they’re about to finish recording a new full length that’ll be VERY much worth checking out.
As winter ends, thoughts will soon turn to the festival season. If you were a promoter, who would you have on your ultimate lineup?
A fine point. Festivals are certainly the mainstay for live work in the UK now, however there are as many new ones popping up about the place as there are ones closing down. As I understand it (from the technical side), the biggest issue is people buying tickets late or at the last minute meaning that the promoters have no available funds upfront with which to secure the basics and the contracts necessary for rigging, venue & PA hire etc. A bit of a nightmare. I wouldn’t want to be doing it myself!
So this is assuming we don’t have the budget for Tears For Fears to reform, Tin Machine to do the same or to pay enough money to have the original lineup of Fields Of The Nephilim (yes, even with Gary Wisker on saxophone) not argue with eachother AND share the same bill as The Sisters of Mercy (playing Floodland, complete with Patricia Morrison)? Fine, maybe not.
On the mainstage, I’d have Emperor (mandatory reformation, it’s as simple as that), Devin Townsend, but then I’d get some further reformations for the rest of that bill: I’d have ‘La Masquerade Infernale’ era Arcturus lineup to perform that album in totality, Akercocke, Cancer (performing the whole of their much maligned Black Faith album), Mindrot and finally the late 90s New Jersey act Human Remains.
On the second stage would be Scott Walker with Einstürzende Neubauten as his backing band, Terry Bozzio (with his full kit) and David Torn performing the whole of ‘Polytown’ but with either Eric Czar or Pino Palladino playing the late Mick Karn’s parts, Gavin Harrison & 05ric, Esben And The Witch, The Eden House, Jordan Reyne and Evi Vine.
There would have to be a spoken word stage as well. Henry Rollins, Steven Berkoff, Nick Cave and Steve Hughes. Actually, can we make this happen?
It’s our round- what’s your posion?
Right, now you’ll need to concentrate with this one: I’ll have an Old Fashioned, but the preparation is crucial and if it’s not done right then I’m going straight home and you’ll be left to explain to all those involved…
The lump of sugar is to be dissolved in a little water by being passed between the mouths of Jennifer Connelly (having first ensured that her husband, Paul Bettany, consents to this) and Rose Leslie (making sure that this arrangement doesn’t distract her from filming any of the next series of Game of Thrones). The mixture is then decanted into a heavy set Edinburgh Crystal whiskey glass that is balanced on the middle of Lily Cole’s back.
This glass is then crawled to a table where Kristen Stewart administers three dashes of Angostura Bitters whilst apologising for all five Twilight movies. In an act of pure contrition, she then fills the glass with ice that has been crushed to a relatively reduced (but not too fine) consistency but with almost inappropriate levels of violence by Tom Hardy, using an iron mallet that sports the insignia of the East India Trading Company.
Next, Stewart passes the glass to Keira Knightley, who is dressed in a ball gown and woad, who introduces two shots of Elijah Craig twelve year old bourbon to the mix and then holds the glass aloft for Ihsahn to flame an orange zest over by way of firebreathing.
Finally, the entire drink is stirred by Stoya using only her finger and powers of suggestion and presented to me on a thin slab of black Cornish slate whilst Joe Satriani plays ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ on a 9 string solid body Strandberg guitar.
Mat Davies