I've run across a number of interesting Cynic interviews recently. I just bumped into this interview with Paul Masvidal that was perticularly interesting while looking for something else.
http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/music/2009/02/never_fit_in_cynic_mixes_it_up.html
By Ben Richardson
Though nurtured in the humid birthplace of modern death metal, Miami, Florida's Cynic never really fit in with its more brutal peers. Despite having played on Death's pivotal album Human (Relativity/Sony, 1991), childhood friends Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert suffused their own material with the swirling melodic experimentation of '70s prog rock and fusion, creating in Cynic a unique hybrid of extreme metal and avant-garde jazz.
Masvidal's guitar playing was filled with haunting melody and lithe fretboard runs that drew on scales and modes not traditionally associated with metal, and his vocals, sung through a vocoder, achieved an eerie, otherworldly quality that fit the music impeccably. Reinert's drumming abandoned the blast-beat bludgeon that defined the extreme metal of the time in favor of a creative, musical approach that fleshed out the band's experimental sound.
Early demos laid the groundwork for their 1993 album Focus (Roadrunner), which quickly became a cult classic among those interested in metal that was challenging and inventive. Such listeners were few in number, however, and the lack of enthusiasm, coupled with the travails of the music industry and the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Andrew, led to the band's break-up in 1994.
Masvidal and Reinert continued to collaborate, and in 2006, they announced that Cynic was re-forming. After playing a number of European festival gigs in the summer of 2007, the group entered the studio the record the long-awaited follow-up to Focus. Traced in Air was released in 2008 on the French label Seasons of Mist, and the outfit has recently begun a full U.S. tour as direct support for Swedish tech-metal titans Meshuggah. I reached Masvidal by phone as he waited to take the stage on the tour's second stop.
SFBG: I want to start off by asking about how the reunion came together. I've read a couple interviews with you about it, and you mentioned the word "synchronicity" a lot. I was hoping to get some further explanation from you of how that synchronicity came about.
PM: Well, it's the nature of synchronicity - a bunch of things happened at a time when they were not expected, simultaneously. They all started lining up. A bunch of people reached out to me in different ways - e-mails and phone calls - making indirect references to Cynic over the course of a two-week period. Basically it was like a super-concentrated Cynic...thing.
I had not imagined or thought about Cynic at all - I had closed the door entirely, and it didn't look like I was ever returning to that. It was just really curious how Cynic appeared in my life. It started out with a kid from Russia who sent an e-mail to our AEon Spoke e-mail [AEon Spoke is a progressive rock band formed by Masvidal and Sean Reinert] saying he had a dream that he saw us at a reunion show somewhere in Europe at a big festival, and it was just phenomenal, and he hoped that we would do this. That led to a few other e-mails, and phone calls, and one thing led to another, and I just remember it reaching a critical mass, and I called my drummer Sean, who was privy to all these things that were unfolding, and I said, "I think we're supposed to do this." It just felt right. In my body, it felt like I could do it. It felt real. It was something that was genuine, and part of the flow - it just seemed effortless, in terms of the process. I got straight to work, and here were are.
SFBG: Were there financial, or business concerns that kind of raised their ugly heads after that more visceral decision to go forward with the reunion, or did that feeling of positivity or naturalness you just referenced kind of override the logistical concerns?
PM: I didn't really think about the financial stuff, because I wasn't really expecting anything from it, financially. It was art for art's sake, which is what it's always been for me, in terms of why we do this, keeping the integrity of the work. So in terms of the head space, it was "let's just check it out. Let's just go with the flow, and see why the universe is calling us again." I didn't want to introduce money into the creative process. It's an annihilation - it's a bad complication.
SFBG: I didn't mean to imply that you guys would get back together for the sake of making money, so much as I thought there might be this kind of interpersonal and artistic desire to get back together that would bring with it all these kind of logistical concerns. I guess you guys have been in the music business since the band broke up.
PM: Yeah, it really wasn't an issue. We had been working as musicians since the Cynic days, and in the world of working musicians, so there was nothing that was really a concern other than doing the legwork and putting things in order and seeing how it would flow. We had some obstacles, things arose as they do, and we just hopped over them and kept moving forward.
SFBG: Another thing that occurred to me, getting back to synchronicity again, was that this is a good time for metal, particularly older metal, metal that was most popular when you guys were at your peak in the late '80s and early '90s. Your reunion has coincided with a lot of other reunions or renaissances of older bands that are reaching new and younger audiences. Was there any conception of that? Had you noticed that?
PM: No, I didn't. The only band I knew of was Atheist. They were one of the synchronicities, and they told me "you've gotta get out there. People are asking about you everywhere we play, and it's amazing that you don't realize it." I was like, "are you serious?" We were totally disconnected from the scene.
We had maintained some contacts, certain things, but otherwise we were just in another world. So that was it. That was the only band I knew of, until we kind of got out there and started playing festivals and doing more shows and realizing that, wow, this is happening, and a lot of people are doing it. It was interesting how it all kind of happened at once. It seems like the scene shifted, a lot, there's been this new blossoming that's happening in terms of creativity. People are more open-minded about all the subgenres. Maybe it was a kind of thing where collectively, all the bands rediscovered why they were doing it, why they were into it. It was certainly interesting to see all the bands that are back.
SFBG: I don't want to box you in with labels, nor do I want to lump you in with other bands, but do you have a sense that progressive music is kind of on the ascendancy? You have bands like Opeth, who are hugely popular - you guys toured with them - but then you also have Mastodon, who wear their progressive influences on their sleeve, and have a major label deal. Coheed and Cambria is another band that has a lot of success without compromising on these wonky, progressive tendencies.
PM: I just feel like there's finally a culture for the intelligent metalhead. What happened with the extreme metal scene and the whole death metal thing was that it was pretty base, and just very... I don't know how to put it, but it was very kind of caveman, in terms of the approach: super-simple, overtly masculine and cheesy.
I think there's this new hybrid that's kind of evolved. We were doing it back then, but it seems like a lot of bands have latched onto it, and its now a legitimate genre full of bands that are successful at it, including a band like Tool, who are not extreme extreme but achieve a high level of art. So yeah, it seems like there's room now for us nerdier types who didn't really belong with the meatheads. We've found a new home, where we can write really interesting and challenging and complex music, at times aggressive and at other times just dynamic. It seems like a real legitimate genre now, or even something genre-less.
I hear a lot about these "Cynic Baby" bands, but I rarely hear Cynic in them. They're influenced by us, but it seems like you have to kind of make your own thing up if you're trying to approach Cynic. It's like trying to rip off Bjork or something - you can't really do it. There's some female singers who can sound like her, but it never sounds like her. I think its really cool to be on the edge of something original and fresh, because it inspires more originality and freshness, hopefully.
SFBG: Do you think that bands like Dragonforce that really show off their technical proficiency, or things like Guitar Hero that show people who might otherwise not take the time to find out the complex construction of music, do you think that benefits bands like you guys that put an emphasis on musicianship, or densely layered or complex composition? Obviously you guys don't sound like Dragonforce.
PM: For us, we don't really regard what we do as trying to prove our musicianship or skill. Cynic has always been almost the opposite of that.
We've always tried to approach it more about song, and trying to serve the song, and never getting too much into a thing about us as individual musicians - it's more about a sound. So that's why you don't hear three-minute guitar solos, or huge jams. We're always kind of serving the greater future of the tune, and that's always been our process. The musicianship is just kind of default - it's just the natural thing, where we are as musicians. We do the kind of music that comes out of us, out of how we play. No matter what I do, even simpler forms of music that aren't as layered, they're going have a higher degree of skill to them - that's just the kind of musician I am. Do you know what I mean?
I try to throw the technique out the window, and not think about it. It's almost the opposite of that: when you're supporting and creating art that has some substance and meaning, you don't want people to get distracted by our skills or chops. We were there, when we were younger, when we had something to prove, but we're in a totally different place now, and have been for a while. It's not about the skill, now: it's about the sound and the music and the songs.
SFBG: It just seems to me like a lot of the '90s was spent kind of detoxing from that overemphasis on technical skill, detoxing from Yngwie Malmsteen and so forth, and now the pendulum has swung back such that you have a generation of young people realizing that to create these interesting sounds, and to write songs like you can, they really have to achieve that proficiency on their instrument, and there are all of these weird ways that people are learning that. Does that make sense?
PM: You're right, and I think the trick is- this is maybe where a lot of the newer bands lose sight of it - is that they think it's all chops, and if you have the chops, you can do it, you can have the sound, and it's not about that.
Chops are almost just an extension of tools - it's like how having a wider vocabulary enables you to articulate your language, to tell your story. So as I see it, chops have always been more about "I just want a wider palette of colors, and I have more variety in this palette if I'm more skilled," but at the end of the day, it really boils down to song, and how the music makes you feel.
If you have more skill, and you've spent some time working on songwriting and developing a sense of melody and harmonic identity, that will all make it special and interesting. Chops don't make anything last, like you were saying with the late '80s, that whole shred era. Chops have their moment, their flash, and then it dies. It doesn't last. Songs last.
SFBG: When you first took your music on stage, incorporating all these unexpected elements, like prog or fusion, was there any animosity? Did people grasp what you were doing right away? Did people feel that you were kind of polluting their metal with other sounds that they might not have been familiar with?
PM: It wasn't easy for us. There were a handful of people who liked us, but for the most part we didn't really fit into the scene we were lumped into. We were kind of on the fringes, and doing our own thing, making our own sounds. The fans that really got it were few and far between.
It was totally part of why we broke up, apart from our frustration with the music industry. It was like "why are we doing this?" We were always doing it for ourselves; that's why it became what it did, but all the frustration and lack of reciprocation was really hard.
The scene was way more primitive then, and we couldn't find our people, and it wasn't until we did the reunion show that we were like "whoa, here's our people." Like metalheads kids in Zappa shirts - "whoa, here you are!" A lot of it is a generation, born post-'80s. We're '70s kids, and the '80s guys grew up on a different version of the scene, and it's not as reactionary. It's more dynamic, diverse, and open - and that's what's so cool about the metal scene. We did have older fans, and we've been meeting them, especially since this new record came out. It's one of those things where it's just grown so much, and it's much bigger now.
SFBG: How has touring with Meshuggah been?
PM: Well, we've only done one show, and we're about to have our second with them. It's been great so far - they're really cool guys. It's an amazing vibe to be around, which makes it much easier. We're enjoying it, and it seems like the shows will be really good.
SFBG: I spoke to someone the other day who was not a metalhead at all, and they were super-excited to see Meshuggah. Do you think because of the notoriety they've gotten, that they bring people out of the woodwork, people who might not otherwise be at a metal show?
PM: It's hard to tell. I think we do that, too, to a certain extent, we see a lot of non-traditional metalheads, and more regular art folk. More an eclectic thing. Meshuggah's pretty heavy - I know they have some more dynamic records, but for the most part, it's an onslaught - a total wall, in-your-face kind of stuff. But they do it in such a deceptively complex way that's its really heady. It requires a different kind of fan, not your traditional death metal fan. It's a little deeper and crazier and probably attracts more musicians.
SFBG: Do you think there are people coming to shows who are more familiar with your other, post-Cynic projects?
PM: Oh, yeah. Every show I get a handful of people who are into AEon Spoke or other stuff we've done. That seems pretty pervasive.
SFBG: When you first started delving into jazz and fusion, after the beginning of Cynic's hiatus, did having played in a metal band affect people's reaction to you?
PM: No, I think if anything it gave me more credibility. At least the people I hang out with. I think the more colorful your background as a musician, the better musician you become. My jazz friends in some ways were envious. They wanted to be in a metal band too! [Laughs] I'm kind of a closet jazz head, too though, and sometimes I wish I could trade places with those friends and live the jazz life. It's not easy, though. It's a way harder road to pursue the life of a jazz musician.
SFBG: I wanted to ask about the new album. I was struck at my first listening by the drum sound you guys had, which seemed to me so much more organic than you usually hear, and I guess I would say that about a lot of the record. In contrast to a lot of prog rock and prog metal that seeks to be very precise and is recorded in this very precise way you guys managed to make a record that sounded very natural. When you went in to record it, was that something that was in the front of your mind, or is that just how it naturally comes out?
PM: That's just how we like to make music, you know. We like to make it about performances, and not process things too much. There's already an extremely modern thing happening with the notes we're choosing and the way we're playing our instruments.
In terms of recording, I'm trying to keep things very organic and pure, and trying to just document a vibe. There's moments where we get into other things, but mostly it's about keeping it real. It needs to sound like us, and not this produced, tweaked thing that isn't us anymore. We try and keep that raw thing part of the process. To me, a lot of modern metal stuff just sounds really sterile. It's too precise, and too perfect.
SFBG: In another interview, you made a comment about your vocoder vocals, which were a distinctive element of the Cynic sound. You said something that really struck me, that when you first started out, one of the reasons you used those vocoder vocals was that you were not as confident with your singing as you could have been, and you wanted to sort of cloud it behind these electronic layers - am I misquoting you on that?
PM: That's one of the reasons. There were a few, but that's the one where I kind of realized later. I wasn't confident enough in my own voice, and I wanted to find a way to disguise it. The other reason, though, was because I didn't think the kind of music we were doing really worked with a straight melodic voice. It was calling for something unique, and original and interesting.
When I came upon this vocoder effect, and started singing the melodies, it was like "oh, this is it, I found it." It had the right emotion - it took the music to this kind of futuristic place. But part of it was just this fear, of feeling naked. Ultimately, it was one of those things that just worked.
SFBG: I was just struck by that comment because it seemed such an incisive perception of that dynamic in singing, and seemed to be a unique perspective on the explosion of auto-tune in popular music, recently. It seems like there are a lot of people that find themselves in that same bind, or at least a similar bind, where they're masking their own voice through layers of process and Auto-Tune.
PM: Well, Auto-Tune's different - I don't think I ever had a problem with pitch. For me, it was the quality of the voice that I wasn't comfortable with. I didn't like how my natural voice sounded, and I wanted to sound like something else. I am more confident now as a singer, but it took a while - it took a lot of years to find a voice that I thought was me, that felt honest. Maybe I wasn't entirely ready to go there yet. They say to invent something new, you need a problem, and that was definitely one of the problems. I just found this thing that was kind of magic for me - it took my voice into these other realms. I wanted to sound not entirely human.
SFBG: I was trying to reference people who purposefully abuse Auto-Tune.
PM: Yeah, and Pro Tools. It's happening with drummers. I won't give any names, but I know a very reputable producer, who does a lot of big bands on the metal scene. He spends the first two weeks of any project fixing the drum tracks and making guys sound like good drummers. It's happening all over the place, fixing the guitars. I'm sorry, I've got my manager calling on their other line.
SFBG: I'll let you go. Thanks for your time, Paul. Have a good show.
http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/music/2009/02/never_fit_in_cynic_mixes_it_up.html
By Ben Richardson
Though nurtured in the humid birthplace of modern death metal, Miami, Florida's Cynic never really fit in with its more brutal peers. Despite having played on Death's pivotal album Human (Relativity/Sony, 1991), childhood friends Paul Masvidal and Sean Reinert suffused their own material with the swirling melodic experimentation of '70s prog rock and fusion, creating in Cynic a unique hybrid of extreme metal and avant-garde jazz.
Masvidal's guitar playing was filled with haunting melody and lithe fretboard runs that drew on scales and modes not traditionally associated with metal, and his vocals, sung through a vocoder, achieved an eerie, otherworldly quality that fit the music impeccably. Reinert's drumming abandoned the blast-beat bludgeon that defined the extreme metal of the time in favor of a creative, musical approach that fleshed out the band's experimental sound.
Early demos laid the groundwork for their 1993 album Focus (Roadrunner), which quickly became a cult classic among those interested in metal that was challenging and inventive. Such listeners were few in number, however, and the lack of enthusiasm, coupled with the travails of the music industry and the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Andrew, led to the band's break-up in 1994.
Masvidal and Reinert continued to collaborate, and in 2006, they announced that Cynic was re-forming. After playing a number of European festival gigs in the summer of 2007, the group entered the studio the record the long-awaited follow-up to Focus. Traced in Air was released in 2008 on the French label Seasons of Mist, and the outfit has recently begun a full U.S. tour as direct support for Swedish tech-metal titans Meshuggah. I reached Masvidal by phone as he waited to take the stage on the tour's second stop.
SFBG: I want to start off by asking about how the reunion came together. I've read a couple interviews with you about it, and you mentioned the word "synchronicity" a lot. I was hoping to get some further explanation from you of how that synchronicity came about.
PM: Well, it's the nature of synchronicity - a bunch of things happened at a time when they were not expected, simultaneously. They all started lining up. A bunch of people reached out to me in different ways - e-mails and phone calls - making indirect references to Cynic over the course of a two-week period. Basically it was like a super-concentrated Cynic...thing.
I had not imagined or thought about Cynic at all - I had closed the door entirely, and it didn't look like I was ever returning to that. It was just really curious how Cynic appeared in my life. It started out with a kid from Russia who sent an e-mail to our AEon Spoke e-mail [AEon Spoke is a progressive rock band formed by Masvidal and Sean Reinert] saying he had a dream that he saw us at a reunion show somewhere in Europe at a big festival, and it was just phenomenal, and he hoped that we would do this. That led to a few other e-mails, and phone calls, and one thing led to another, and I just remember it reaching a critical mass, and I called my drummer Sean, who was privy to all these things that were unfolding, and I said, "I think we're supposed to do this." It just felt right. In my body, it felt like I could do it. It felt real. It was something that was genuine, and part of the flow - it just seemed effortless, in terms of the process. I got straight to work, and here were are.
SFBG: Were there financial, or business concerns that kind of raised their ugly heads after that more visceral decision to go forward with the reunion, or did that feeling of positivity or naturalness you just referenced kind of override the logistical concerns?
PM: I didn't really think about the financial stuff, because I wasn't really expecting anything from it, financially. It was art for art's sake, which is what it's always been for me, in terms of why we do this, keeping the integrity of the work. So in terms of the head space, it was "let's just check it out. Let's just go with the flow, and see why the universe is calling us again." I didn't want to introduce money into the creative process. It's an annihilation - it's a bad complication.
SFBG: I didn't mean to imply that you guys would get back together for the sake of making money, so much as I thought there might be this kind of interpersonal and artistic desire to get back together that would bring with it all these kind of logistical concerns. I guess you guys have been in the music business since the band broke up.
PM: Yeah, it really wasn't an issue. We had been working as musicians since the Cynic days, and in the world of working musicians, so there was nothing that was really a concern other than doing the legwork and putting things in order and seeing how it would flow. We had some obstacles, things arose as they do, and we just hopped over them and kept moving forward.
SFBG: Another thing that occurred to me, getting back to synchronicity again, was that this is a good time for metal, particularly older metal, metal that was most popular when you guys were at your peak in the late '80s and early '90s. Your reunion has coincided with a lot of other reunions or renaissances of older bands that are reaching new and younger audiences. Was there any conception of that? Had you noticed that?
PM: No, I didn't. The only band I knew of was Atheist. They were one of the synchronicities, and they told me "you've gotta get out there. People are asking about you everywhere we play, and it's amazing that you don't realize it." I was like, "are you serious?" We were totally disconnected from the scene.
We had maintained some contacts, certain things, but otherwise we were just in another world. So that was it. That was the only band I knew of, until we kind of got out there and started playing festivals and doing more shows and realizing that, wow, this is happening, and a lot of people are doing it. It was interesting how it all kind of happened at once. It seems like the scene shifted, a lot, there's been this new blossoming that's happening in terms of creativity. People are more open-minded about all the subgenres. Maybe it was a kind of thing where collectively, all the bands rediscovered why they were doing it, why they were into it. It was certainly interesting to see all the bands that are back.
SFBG: I don't want to box you in with labels, nor do I want to lump you in with other bands, but do you have a sense that progressive music is kind of on the ascendancy? You have bands like Opeth, who are hugely popular - you guys toured with them - but then you also have Mastodon, who wear their progressive influences on their sleeve, and have a major label deal. Coheed and Cambria is another band that has a lot of success without compromising on these wonky, progressive tendencies.
PM: I just feel like there's finally a culture for the intelligent metalhead. What happened with the extreme metal scene and the whole death metal thing was that it was pretty base, and just very... I don't know how to put it, but it was very kind of caveman, in terms of the approach: super-simple, overtly masculine and cheesy.
I think there's this new hybrid that's kind of evolved. We were doing it back then, but it seems like a lot of bands have latched onto it, and its now a legitimate genre full of bands that are successful at it, including a band like Tool, who are not extreme extreme but achieve a high level of art. So yeah, it seems like there's room now for us nerdier types who didn't really belong with the meatheads. We've found a new home, where we can write really interesting and challenging and complex music, at times aggressive and at other times just dynamic. It seems like a real legitimate genre now, or even something genre-less.
I hear a lot about these "Cynic Baby" bands, but I rarely hear Cynic in them. They're influenced by us, but it seems like you have to kind of make your own thing up if you're trying to approach Cynic. It's like trying to rip off Bjork or something - you can't really do it. There's some female singers who can sound like her, but it never sounds like her. I think its really cool to be on the edge of something original and fresh, because it inspires more originality and freshness, hopefully.
SFBG: Do you think that bands like Dragonforce that really show off their technical proficiency, or things like Guitar Hero that show people who might otherwise not take the time to find out the complex construction of music, do you think that benefits bands like you guys that put an emphasis on musicianship, or densely layered or complex composition? Obviously you guys don't sound like Dragonforce.
PM: For us, we don't really regard what we do as trying to prove our musicianship or skill. Cynic has always been almost the opposite of that.
We've always tried to approach it more about song, and trying to serve the song, and never getting too much into a thing about us as individual musicians - it's more about a sound. So that's why you don't hear three-minute guitar solos, or huge jams. We're always kind of serving the greater future of the tune, and that's always been our process. The musicianship is just kind of default - it's just the natural thing, where we are as musicians. We do the kind of music that comes out of us, out of how we play. No matter what I do, even simpler forms of music that aren't as layered, they're going have a higher degree of skill to them - that's just the kind of musician I am. Do you know what I mean?
I try to throw the technique out the window, and not think about it. It's almost the opposite of that: when you're supporting and creating art that has some substance and meaning, you don't want people to get distracted by our skills or chops. We were there, when we were younger, when we had something to prove, but we're in a totally different place now, and have been for a while. It's not about the skill, now: it's about the sound and the music and the songs.
SFBG: It just seems to me like a lot of the '90s was spent kind of detoxing from that overemphasis on technical skill, detoxing from Yngwie Malmsteen and so forth, and now the pendulum has swung back such that you have a generation of young people realizing that to create these interesting sounds, and to write songs like you can, they really have to achieve that proficiency on their instrument, and there are all of these weird ways that people are learning that. Does that make sense?
PM: You're right, and I think the trick is- this is maybe where a lot of the newer bands lose sight of it - is that they think it's all chops, and if you have the chops, you can do it, you can have the sound, and it's not about that.
Chops are almost just an extension of tools - it's like how having a wider vocabulary enables you to articulate your language, to tell your story. So as I see it, chops have always been more about "I just want a wider palette of colors, and I have more variety in this palette if I'm more skilled," but at the end of the day, it really boils down to song, and how the music makes you feel.
If you have more skill, and you've spent some time working on songwriting and developing a sense of melody and harmonic identity, that will all make it special and interesting. Chops don't make anything last, like you were saying with the late '80s, that whole shred era. Chops have their moment, their flash, and then it dies. It doesn't last. Songs last.
SFBG: When you first took your music on stage, incorporating all these unexpected elements, like prog or fusion, was there any animosity? Did people grasp what you were doing right away? Did people feel that you were kind of polluting their metal with other sounds that they might not have been familiar with?
PM: It wasn't easy for us. There were a handful of people who liked us, but for the most part we didn't really fit into the scene we were lumped into. We were kind of on the fringes, and doing our own thing, making our own sounds. The fans that really got it were few and far between.
It was totally part of why we broke up, apart from our frustration with the music industry. It was like "why are we doing this?" We were always doing it for ourselves; that's why it became what it did, but all the frustration and lack of reciprocation was really hard.
The scene was way more primitive then, and we couldn't find our people, and it wasn't until we did the reunion show that we were like "whoa, here's our people." Like metalheads kids in Zappa shirts - "whoa, here you are!" A lot of it is a generation, born post-'80s. We're '70s kids, and the '80s guys grew up on a different version of the scene, and it's not as reactionary. It's more dynamic, diverse, and open - and that's what's so cool about the metal scene. We did have older fans, and we've been meeting them, especially since this new record came out. It's one of those things where it's just grown so much, and it's much bigger now.
SFBG: How has touring with Meshuggah been?
PM: Well, we've only done one show, and we're about to have our second with them. It's been great so far - they're really cool guys. It's an amazing vibe to be around, which makes it much easier. We're enjoying it, and it seems like the shows will be really good.
SFBG: I spoke to someone the other day who was not a metalhead at all, and they were super-excited to see Meshuggah. Do you think because of the notoriety they've gotten, that they bring people out of the woodwork, people who might not otherwise be at a metal show?
PM: It's hard to tell. I think we do that, too, to a certain extent, we see a lot of non-traditional metalheads, and more regular art folk. More an eclectic thing. Meshuggah's pretty heavy - I know they have some more dynamic records, but for the most part, it's an onslaught - a total wall, in-your-face kind of stuff. But they do it in such a deceptively complex way that's its really heady. It requires a different kind of fan, not your traditional death metal fan. It's a little deeper and crazier and probably attracts more musicians.
SFBG: Do you think there are people coming to shows who are more familiar with your other, post-Cynic projects?
PM: Oh, yeah. Every show I get a handful of people who are into AEon Spoke or other stuff we've done. That seems pretty pervasive.
SFBG: When you first started delving into jazz and fusion, after the beginning of Cynic's hiatus, did having played in a metal band affect people's reaction to you?
PM: No, I think if anything it gave me more credibility. At least the people I hang out with. I think the more colorful your background as a musician, the better musician you become. My jazz friends in some ways were envious. They wanted to be in a metal band too! [Laughs] I'm kind of a closet jazz head, too though, and sometimes I wish I could trade places with those friends and live the jazz life. It's not easy, though. It's a way harder road to pursue the life of a jazz musician.
SFBG: I wanted to ask about the new album. I was struck at my first listening by the drum sound you guys had, which seemed to me so much more organic than you usually hear, and I guess I would say that about a lot of the record. In contrast to a lot of prog rock and prog metal that seeks to be very precise and is recorded in this very precise way you guys managed to make a record that sounded very natural. When you went in to record it, was that something that was in the front of your mind, or is that just how it naturally comes out?
PM: That's just how we like to make music, you know. We like to make it about performances, and not process things too much. There's already an extremely modern thing happening with the notes we're choosing and the way we're playing our instruments.
In terms of recording, I'm trying to keep things very organic and pure, and trying to just document a vibe. There's moments where we get into other things, but mostly it's about keeping it real. It needs to sound like us, and not this produced, tweaked thing that isn't us anymore. We try and keep that raw thing part of the process. To me, a lot of modern metal stuff just sounds really sterile. It's too precise, and too perfect.
SFBG: In another interview, you made a comment about your vocoder vocals, which were a distinctive element of the Cynic sound. You said something that really struck me, that when you first started out, one of the reasons you used those vocoder vocals was that you were not as confident with your singing as you could have been, and you wanted to sort of cloud it behind these electronic layers - am I misquoting you on that?
PM: That's one of the reasons. There were a few, but that's the one where I kind of realized later. I wasn't confident enough in my own voice, and I wanted to find a way to disguise it. The other reason, though, was because I didn't think the kind of music we were doing really worked with a straight melodic voice. It was calling for something unique, and original and interesting.
When I came upon this vocoder effect, and started singing the melodies, it was like "oh, this is it, I found it." It had the right emotion - it took the music to this kind of futuristic place. But part of it was just this fear, of feeling naked. Ultimately, it was one of those things that just worked.
SFBG: I was just struck by that comment because it seemed such an incisive perception of that dynamic in singing, and seemed to be a unique perspective on the explosion of auto-tune in popular music, recently. It seems like there are a lot of people that find themselves in that same bind, or at least a similar bind, where they're masking their own voice through layers of process and Auto-Tune.
PM: Well, Auto-Tune's different - I don't think I ever had a problem with pitch. For me, it was the quality of the voice that I wasn't comfortable with. I didn't like how my natural voice sounded, and I wanted to sound like something else. I am more confident now as a singer, but it took a while - it took a lot of years to find a voice that I thought was me, that felt honest. Maybe I wasn't entirely ready to go there yet. They say to invent something new, you need a problem, and that was definitely one of the problems. I just found this thing that was kind of magic for me - it took my voice into these other realms. I wanted to sound not entirely human.
SFBG: I was trying to reference people who purposefully abuse Auto-Tune.
PM: Yeah, and Pro Tools. It's happening with drummers. I won't give any names, but I know a very reputable producer, who does a lot of big bands on the metal scene. He spends the first two weeks of any project fixing the drum tracks and making guys sound like good drummers. It's happening all over the place, fixing the guitars. I'm sorry, I've got my manager calling on their other line.
SFBG: I'll let you go. Thanks for your time, Paul. Have a good show.
