Hi, guys! I really liked your album. I guess it was a little difficult recording it because of the complex music you play.
Scoredatura: It certainly wasn’t easy, but recording everything at my home studio made everything a lot less stressful. I spent a week tracking drums, doing take after take till I got it right and ‘tight.’ Peter, Carl and Tom all have busy schedules so we just got together when ever we had time to track bass and guitars. We basically played it until it was right, or right enough. If things aren’t working you’ve got the time to take a break, or even leave it for the day, without thinking about paying studio fees or an engineer.
Metal Addicts: Most heavy metallers aren’t that found of jazz. That’s the same among metal bands, which have a lot of other influences rather than jazz. Most people don’t know that, but in the 1970’s there some bands doing such experiments as you did with Tense. Just to mention some: Deep Purple’s Machine Head, Black Sabbath’s Never Say Die, and Jeff Beck’s Blow By Blow, for whom I guess you got much of your influence, tell me if I’m wrong. What are your influences? What are you listening to now?
Scoredatura: You’re wrong. Ha Ha! Very sorry to say, but u did tell me to say it. Those bands would definitely have influenced the bands that influenced us. But Meshuggah is easily our biggest influence, along with Animals As Leaders, Tesseract, Plini, The Helix Nebula and Periphery. I think these days a lot of metal heads can at least appreciate jazz and jazz influenced music, jazz guys may get a little freaked out by the ferocity of heavier music, but I think deep down they can appreciate the technical ability of the musicians.
(Note: sometimes we are terribly wrong… Just that… hahahahahahaha)
Metal Addicts: You are a band that play instrumental music, which is great because during the 1980’s and 1990’s they were kind of common, but most of them were one ego band, I mean, they made music to satisfy the ego of a musician, most of the times, a guitar player. And you don’t do that, you are a band that make music as a band and that’s fantastic. Why did you choose to make an instrumental album?
Scoredatura: Because vocalists just get in the way!!! No not really. If a band has killer riffs then I’ll be a fan. If that same band also has a singer, than so be it. Meshuggah is a good example of this. Jens vocal is more of a percussion instrument than a voice, and his sound certainly adds to intensity of the band. I may end up writing songs for vocals in the future, but it’s not what I love about the music so I may just stick to a four piece. I just want to write good riffs that can turn into good songs. There is definitely some technical ability involved but only if that’s what the riff or the song requires. The ‘Hard Lander’ songs are pretty simple, I just liked the sound of the riff with Pete and Carl soloing over the top. There is the occasional ego bashing on the album, but it has to build up to it.
Metal Addicts: In a metal instrumental piece, the guitar has to take the lead to perform the melody, which is regularly made by the singer, and it takes a lot of technique and feeling to do that. How was the songwriting process? And something that worried me while listening to you and I had never thought before, how did you choose the song’s tittles as there were no lyrics?
Scoredatura: Ah yes, song titles on instrumental tunes are pretty pointless. The only reason I gave the songs titles was because I couldn’t really call them song 1, song 2. There’s really no deep meaning to any of the titles. For instance “Tense” got its title because some of the riffs are based on cycles of ten beats (and because it makes us tense when we play it). As far as the song writing process went, I pretty much wrote all the songs in Logic and then fine-tuned the ideas with the guys after they were completed. Songs like ‘Bear Attack,’ ‘Jakey’s Mower,’ and ‘Too Loud Enough,’ were written a few years ago so they had the opportunity to be played live with slight adjustments along the way. ‘Tense,’ and ‘In A Way,’ haven’t been played live yet, so there may still some adjustments to come.
Metal Addicts: I was really impressed by the drumming with all that counter-time beats and the technique applied. It is not that easy to do that in a studio. Did you guys have a formal musical background or so?
Scoredatura: Yes we all studied music at university and are all working professional musicians in Sydney. We mostly studied and perform jazz music but have always been into progressive metal. Mixing jazz and metal, I’ll admit, is a strange combination, but it just feels natural to us. As far as the counter-time drum beats go, some of them came naturally from working on jazz four-way independence for many years, others took a bit to work out, but I really enjoy learning new patterns especially different bass drum patterns over a solid 4 or 6 beat. Tomas Haake from Meshuggah is the king of this!
Metal Addicts: I guess that to release a CD is a life-changing experience. How did it change your lives? And what are your future plans?
Scoredatura: It didn’t really change our lives that much, we still do gigs for lots of different artists. It’s just nice when people come up and say they really dig the album. Even our jazz mates who aren’t into metal at all can appreciate what we do. It’s not like I’m going to go buy a new Ferrari from album sales, perhaps a new pair of shoes…
Metal Addicts: An instrumental metal band requires a specific audience as you don’t have a frontman to entertain the public. Can you tell us how your shows are?
Scoredatura: They simply involve us playing and pulling funny faces to entertain the crowd. Tom will sometimes try to remove his clothes but we’ve put a stop to that. We hope that audiences can just enjoy the grooves, riffs and solos for what they are, without a vocal acrobat with a cute body out the front. Peter is cute enough anyway.
Metal Addicts: Well, guys, thank you very much for your time! I really liked the experienced of listening to you.
Scoredatura: Thanks for getting into the album! It means a lot to us. If anyone wants to check out the album you can get it at bandcamp or itunes, the links are below:
https://scoredatura.bandcamp.com/album/tense and https:// itunes.apple.com/au/album/tense/id1170163852
