[imgleft]http://www.russell.ultimatemetal.com/Interview/forruin02.jpg[/imgleft]By Katalin Sipos
In January, just a few months after the release of their latest demo, Obsidian, Ireland’s For Ruin signed to Sentinel Records and are now reparing to record their first full-length album. As such, it was time to talk to the band again, about their past, present, and future. John Murphy, the mastermind behind For Ruin took the time to answer UM’s questions.
Hello John! Nice to talk to you again! A lot has happened since we talked, let’s start with the line-up changes. Why did Ollie O’ Shea, Ian O’ Donnabháin and Steve O’ Connell left the band? Who are the new members and what should we know about them?
Hi Katalin, greetings from Ireland again, good to hear from you. Yes, we have been extremely busy since the last time I did an interview for you. When Ollie joined the band he let me know that he would be going to Australia in August of ’06, so I was preparing a replacement guitarist called Drew Myers for a while. Ollie’s last show with us was the Day of Darkness festival last summer and he took off for Oz. A great guy - he is around Cork again at the moment for a while but is heading back out to Oz again for another while. Check out his solo-band Dominus its good stuff.
So we knew Ollie was leaving, but before he left, Steve decided to travel in S.E. Asia for a year and left in the early summer ’06, before the DOD show. He is in Oz now, and I’m in touch all the time with him. Another great guy! So for the DOD show I asked a guy called Barry English to drum for us – he filled in for that show (with Ollie, Ian and I) and has stayed since I’m delighted to say. He is a friend of Ian´s so the link was there. He’s the best drummer I’ve ever played with – in fact, I think he is the best drummer in Ireland and many would agree. He used to play in another Cork band, and also has his own 2-man grind band called I’ll Eat Your Face. Then, in September, Ian decided to study a masters in Sweden, so he was gone! I asked Barry if the guy he played with in I’ll Eat Your Face, another Barry, would play bass for us for a few gigs last October and he agreed. So the 3 guys all left of their own accord, and I was sorry to see them go – they really helped build the band up and got the name out there – they are all great guys.
Your latest demo was released a while back. Did you write the songs again, all alone? Or any of the other members contributed to the new material?
Some of the songs on Obsidian, out since the end of Summer 2006, have been around for a while – but December and Wake were the newest tracks, written after the release of Shade in ’05. I wrote and recorded them at various stages at home myself - kind of during the lineup changes, so again all the material was my own this time.
In fact though, the demo was almost not released at all. I had some interest from labels on the back of the Shade demo, and was going to hold on to the songs (the new ones that appear on Obsidian) for an album. But there were some delays, so to keep the interest in the band, I put out 100 hand-numbered copies of Obsidian (and subsequently another 100 copies were pressed) so it is a very limited release. As soon as Obsidian was release I was already writing and demo-ing new tracks – its an ongoing process!
Are the songs on Obsidian totally new or have you used old but previously unreleased material?
December, Wake, Into Red and Jaded are all `new’ songs. Treading, as you highlight below, is a reworked version with some beautiful (real) string parts and melodies. Its a haunting track. Jaded is a very old song, and written (along with Starling off the Shade demo) for another pre-For Ruin project. I adapted it for FR, that’s the best way to put it... maybe the original versions of those 2 songs will be released somewhere for fun...
You chose the song, ’Treading’ from your very first demo (2001) to re-record and put on Obsidian. Why?
The 1st (split) demo was released in 2003 in fact. The song as it appeared on that demo could have been recorded better, so that’s what I did. I asked a friend to play strings on it for me and I think they lend a great sense of space and atmosphere to the song. I think I got it right on Obsidian this time – but these are just demos, and not widely distributed – it may appear in another version (along with other songs!) on future releases. On Shade I re-recorded Vertigo so trying to improve on older versions is nothing new for FR!
The new songs have a more direct melodic death metal approach. Was this change - to almost leave the black metal marks out completely - conscious?
Melody will always be a strong, instantly recognizable aspect of For Ruin. If your idea of BM is Darkthone etc., no, we are not BM. We play a style that, thankfully, people find it hard to categorize. We are neither BM nor DM – we are somewhere in between. The songs on Obsidianas it happens have some short blasts (does that make them BM? I don’t think so!) but there is variation and that is the key to it I think. The song Wake has done very well for us; it is a good example of the current sound of the band. Since Obsidian was released though I have written 5 or so new songs, some of them very fast and aggressive again and others more mid-paced. That’s always the way it will be I think!
How long did it take to record this time? Did you play on all the instruments or were some played by the new members?
As I stated above, the songs on Obsidian were basically just recorded so I had a record of them as I was going along. They were recorded at various times during 2006, and the 1st lineup of the band were playing songs that appeared on Obsidian long before its release (like Into Red, Jaded and December). All of the songs on Obsidian for those reasons were written, played and recorded by myself.
In January you signed a record deal. How did you get in contact with the record label?
Sentinel is an Irish label that has worked with Mourning Beloveth, Abbadon Incarnate etc.. I sent Shade to a lot of labels in 2005 and some, including Sentinel, expressed interest and some made offers to the band. I wasn’t too happy with any of the international offers and I went back and spoke to Brian in Sentinel.
In early 2006 Sentinel said they were interested in the band, but they were going through some label changes and wanted to wait a little while. That’s why Obsidian was released – I sent them the Obsidian tracks to show the band’s development, and between them and us we decided to put out the Obsidian demo to keep the interest up in the band while the label were sorting some issues. In December 2006 then we started to negotiate a contract and announced it in January. Drew, the two Barry’s and I signed the deal for two releases with Sentinel and are very happy with the way things look for us. We have control of all aspects of our music etc., and are looking forward to recording our debut for Sentinel!
As far as I know you were about to start the recording of your debut album in mid March and according to your homepage you have finished it. Tell us about the recording proccess.
Yes, we started with the drum tracks on March 17th in Secret Garden Studios, about 30 mins outside our city. The studio is currently relocating and is in a really rural area - the studio is not quite finished yet so we used a few parts of the house and it worked really well except for the fact that the same weekend was bloody freezing and the studio has no heating! In fact we set aside 3 days for drums alone - the plan was to record them and roughly process them there in SGS. That´s what we did - Barry did all the tracking with me in the room with him, playing along monitoring through headphones so it was very "live" for us. We had practiced playing along with a click to keep the tempos right and that worked really well. We recorded 3 takes of most songs on the drums and because they were played to a click we could take parts from each take to compile a perfect take if we didnt get it right all the way through. Its a great way to record. We recorded on one day and mixed the folowing two days and it worked out great. We recorded drums for 15 or 16 songs I think and ten are on the album - the other songs will surface in the future.
What was it like to record the songs as a band?
In recent years almost all of my own recording have been done alone. In the past I have recorded (as a drummer) with bands and I know how it works. But this time, for me personally, it was quite different. Everyone had learnt the stuff really well, we had played the older songs live a lot and the new ones came together quickly so when the drums were done, we left SGS and moved the operation to my home studio. I had recently moved house (just two weeks before) so everything was thrown together (and still is!) but we sorted it out. I have less room than I had before and the acoustics are not perfect by a long shot, but the way I record doesn´t need that. The guys came to my house then for a few evenings and played their stuff. Drew took 2 nights to record all his tracks and played great - Barry came and played his bass tracks through a nice valve channel and that only took one night. I put down my own guitars and vocals over a few weeks, on and off, when I had the free time. My poor neighbours probably heard me shouting my head off from time to time but there you go...! In a way there was less pressure on me performance-wise, becauase the guys are great musicians and played brilliantly so i didnt have to concentrate on that - I just worried about helping them along, getting the best performances out of them and being critical of every note that went onto disk. The disadvantage of the small space though is that we were never all together as a band in the same room during the recording - but I know that can create problems as well...
Have you re-recorded old songs for the debut album? Or you wrote completely new ones?
Yes to both questions. Its important to remember that the band´s first 3 releases were demos, only heard by a relative handful of people globally. There are 10 tracks on the album (43 minutes) and 3 of them are "brand new". In fact one is a very old song so in a way that´s new as well as few people will have heard it. So there are 6 of the demo songs on the album really, re-recorded and benefiting from a year´s worth of being played live - they have adapted from the demo versions. Also, this time around there are no acoustic or keyboard parts anywhere on the album (and very little clean-sounding guitars in fact), so it is full-on. We wanted the songs recorded as we play them live so the album has a raw edge to it. It is not over produced either - you can hear everything and sonically it sounds like it should sound to my ears. I love good productions (Rammstein, White Zombie, Type-O etc.) but this band doesn't sound like that in reality. We kept some of the new songs back, as well as a cover version for a future release...
When will be the album out?
We are told that it will be available late June or early July, so not too long now! Shellshock are confirmed as one distributor and others are being lined up as well so hopefully we will get it out everywhere soon. The artwork and tracklist are online now and there will be audio samples available soon at the MySpace and at www.forruin.com - we should have new shirts and stuff out in time for the album release as well. We are playing with Napalm Death in our home town in August and we have a slot with another big DM band in November that will be annouced soon. A lot of dates will be confirmed to support the album, nationally and internationally I hope!
You were featured on an unsigned-special CD by Terrorizer last year. Did it have a positive impact on the band’s reputation?
Yes, definitely – people contacted the band from the world over. It was a very worthwhile exercise – and watch out for more Terrorizer coverage for FR in the near future!
You have played a lot of shows last year. Which was the most memorable gig? And why?
We played a lot, yes its true. We played with Decapitated, Destruction, Primordial, Mourning Beloveth, Madder Mortem and many others. We were booked to play with Rotting Christ but that fell through unfortunately. The Winterfest show in Cork just before xmas was great as I think a lot of people in our home town saw how far we had come and improved. They are all memorable for me because we get to do what we enjoy most!
You released a live DVD. Please tell us about it.
Yes it’s filmed on two cameras, nicely edited with good sound, menus and a photo gallery. It came out really well. Its the Winterfest show mentioned above – it cost us very little to film and looked so good that we decided to get a limited number of copies made up. They may be collector’s items in the future ha ha! It looks great though, and shows the band playing a selection of songs from the first 3 demos and one brand new song called Frailty.
Bands don’t often release live albums or DVDs when they have got only demos out previously. How did this idea come up?
Well a couple of camera guys were going to be there and we paid to have the show filmed. One of the promoters is a fan of FR and he edited it for us – and did a great job! Its a nice document of the band at this point – that’s what every release any band puts out (be it audio or video) is – a snapshot of the band at that time. Its nice to have. We have some other footage as well (this is the media age!) on video as well as audio, so maybe they will be useful in the future!
Have you sold many copies so far?
It was limited to 50 copies – there are about 20 copies left i think.
Beside recording your first full-length album, what are For Ruin’s plans for 2007?
Well it will be a busy year for the band for sure. We will launch the album in Dublin in early summer I hope, get more shirts printed and play lots of shows. We have the chance of playing Scotland in September I think, and we would like to play some UK shows. We will be recording 15 songs for the album and as I say, 11 or so will be on the album. The current idea is to keep back 3 or 4 songs for an MCD later in the year, with a video to be included on the MCD. We’ll see what happens there. We have plans for the video, and it will be a song from the album, so i suppose the MCD will be like an extended single (possibly Wak) or something. That’s what we hope to do anyway. On a personal note I will be a first-time-father (all going well!) in early August, so band things will be quiet for a while around then!
Thanks a lot for your time! Anything you would like to add?
Yes, thanks for the interview again! FR will be featured on the What’s Metal? Radio show (Osnabruck, DE) on March 1st so anyone living up there can check it out. The interview is also online at www.forruin.com I think. We are also doing a lot of other national and international press (including an upcoming Terrorizer feature I hope) at the moment so watch out! Cheers! J & FR.
Official For Ruin website
Official For Ruin myspace page
In January, just a few months after the release of their latest demo, Obsidian, Ireland’s For Ruin signed to Sentinel Records and are now reparing to record their first full-length album. As such, it was time to talk to the band again, about their past, present, and future. John Murphy, the mastermind behind For Ruin took the time to answer UM’s questions.
Hello John! Nice to talk to you again! A lot has happened since we talked, let’s start with the line-up changes. Why did Ollie O’ Shea, Ian O’ Donnabháin and Steve O’ Connell left the band? Who are the new members and what should we know about them?
Hi Katalin, greetings from Ireland again, good to hear from you. Yes, we have been extremely busy since the last time I did an interview for you. When Ollie joined the band he let me know that he would be going to Australia in August of ’06, so I was preparing a replacement guitarist called Drew Myers for a while. Ollie’s last show with us was the Day of Darkness festival last summer and he took off for Oz. A great guy - he is around Cork again at the moment for a while but is heading back out to Oz again for another while. Check out his solo-band Dominus its good stuff.
So we knew Ollie was leaving, but before he left, Steve decided to travel in S.E. Asia for a year and left in the early summer ’06, before the DOD show. He is in Oz now, and I’m in touch all the time with him. Another great guy! So for the DOD show I asked a guy called Barry English to drum for us – he filled in for that show (with Ollie, Ian and I) and has stayed since I’m delighted to say. He is a friend of Ian´s so the link was there. He’s the best drummer I’ve ever played with – in fact, I think he is the best drummer in Ireland and many would agree. He used to play in another Cork band, and also has his own 2-man grind band called I’ll Eat Your Face. Then, in September, Ian decided to study a masters in Sweden, so he was gone! I asked Barry if the guy he played with in I’ll Eat Your Face, another Barry, would play bass for us for a few gigs last October and he agreed. So the 3 guys all left of their own accord, and I was sorry to see them go – they really helped build the band up and got the name out there – they are all great guys.
Your latest demo was released a while back. Did you write the songs again, all alone? Or any of the other members contributed to the new material?
Some of the songs on Obsidian, out since the end of Summer 2006, have been around for a while – but December and Wake were the newest tracks, written after the release of Shade in ’05. I wrote and recorded them at various stages at home myself - kind of during the lineup changes, so again all the material was my own this time.
In fact though, the demo was almost not released at all. I had some interest from labels on the back of the Shade demo, and was going to hold on to the songs (the new ones that appear on Obsidian) for an album. But there were some delays, so to keep the interest in the band, I put out 100 hand-numbered copies of Obsidian (and subsequently another 100 copies were pressed) so it is a very limited release. As soon as Obsidian was release I was already writing and demo-ing new tracks – its an ongoing process!
Are the songs on Obsidian totally new or have you used old but previously unreleased material?
December, Wake, Into Red and Jaded are all `new’ songs. Treading, as you highlight below, is a reworked version with some beautiful (real) string parts and melodies. Its a haunting track. Jaded is a very old song, and written (along with Starling off the Shade demo) for another pre-For Ruin project. I adapted it for FR, that’s the best way to put it... maybe the original versions of those 2 songs will be released somewhere for fun...
You chose the song, ’Treading’ from your very first demo (2001) to re-record and put on Obsidian. Why?
The 1st (split) demo was released in 2003 in fact. The song as it appeared on that demo could have been recorded better, so that’s what I did. I asked a friend to play strings on it for me and I think they lend a great sense of space and atmosphere to the song. I think I got it right on Obsidian this time – but these are just demos, and not widely distributed – it may appear in another version (along with other songs!) on future releases. On Shade I re-recorded Vertigo so trying to improve on older versions is nothing new for FR!
The new songs have a more direct melodic death metal approach. Was this change - to almost leave the black metal marks out completely - conscious?
Melody will always be a strong, instantly recognizable aspect of For Ruin. If your idea of BM is Darkthone etc., no, we are not BM. We play a style that, thankfully, people find it hard to categorize. We are neither BM nor DM – we are somewhere in between. The songs on Obsidianas it happens have some short blasts (does that make them BM? I don’t think so!) but there is variation and that is the key to it I think. The song Wake has done very well for us; it is a good example of the current sound of the band. Since Obsidian was released though I have written 5 or so new songs, some of them very fast and aggressive again and others more mid-paced. That’s always the way it will be I think!
How long did it take to record this time? Did you play on all the instruments or were some played by the new members?
As I stated above, the songs on Obsidian were basically just recorded so I had a record of them as I was going along. They were recorded at various times during 2006, and the 1st lineup of the band were playing songs that appeared on Obsidian long before its release (like Into Red, Jaded and December). All of the songs on Obsidian for those reasons were written, played and recorded by myself.
In January you signed a record deal. How did you get in contact with the record label?
Sentinel is an Irish label that has worked with Mourning Beloveth, Abbadon Incarnate etc.. I sent Shade to a lot of labels in 2005 and some, including Sentinel, expressed interest and some made offers to the band. I wasn’t too happy with any of the international offers and I went back and spoke to Brian in Sentinel.
In early 2006 Sentinel said they were interested in the band, but they were going through some label changes and wanted to wait a little while. That’s why Obsidian was released – I sent them the Obsidian tracks to show the band’s development, and between them and us we decided to put out the Obsidian demo to keep the interest up in the band while the label were sorting some issues. In December 2006 then we started to negotiate a contract and announced it in January. Drew, the two Barry’s and I signed the deal for two releases with Sentinel and are very happy with the way things look for us. We have control of all aspects of our music etc., and are looking forward to recording our debut for Sentinel!
As far as I know you were about to start the recording of your debut album in mid March and according to your homepage you have finished it. Tell us about the recording proccess.
Yes, we started with the drum tracks on March 17th in Secret Garden Studios, about 30 mins outside our city. The studio is currently relocating and is in a really rural area - the studio is not quite finished yet so we used a few parts of the house and it worked really well except for the fact that the same weekend was bloody freezing and the studio has no heating! In fact we set aside 3 days for drums alone - the plan was to record them and roughly process them there in SGS. That´s what we did - Barry did all the tracking with me in the room with him, playing along monitoring through headphones so it was very "live" for us. We had practiced playing along with a click to keep the tempos right and that worked really well. We recorded 3 takes of most songs on the drums and because they were played to a click we could take parts from each take to compile a perfect take if we didnt get it right all the way through. Its a great way to record. We recorded on one day and mixed the folowing two days and it worked out great. We recorded drums for 15 or 16 songs I think and ten are on the album - the other songs will surface in the future.
What was it like to record the songs as a band?
In recent years almost all of my own recording have been done alone. In the past I have recorded (as a drummer) with bands and I know how it works. But this time, for me personally, it was quite different. Everyone had learnt the stuff really well, we had played the older songs live a lot and the new ones came together quickly so when the drums were done, we left SGS and moved the operation to my home studio. I had recently moved house (just two weeks before) so everything was thrown together (and still is!) but we sorted it out. I have less room than I had before and the acoustics are not perfect by a long shot, but the way I record doesn´t need that. The guys came to my house then for a few evenings and played their stuff. Drew took 2 nights to record all his tracks and played great - Barry came and played his bass tracks through a nice valve channel and that only took one night. I put down my own guitars and vocals over a few weeks, on and off, when I had the free time. My poor neighbours probably heard me shouting my head off from time to time but there you go...! In a way there was less pressure on me performance-wise, becauase the guys are great musicians and played brilliantly so i didnt have to concentrate on that - I just worried about helping them along, getting the best performances out of them and being critical of every note that went onto disk. The disadvantage of the small space though is that we were never all together as a band in the same room during the recording - but I know that can create problems as well...
Have you re-recorded old songs for the debut album? Or you wrote completely new ones?
Yes to both questions. Its important to remember that the band´s first 3 releases were demos, only heard by a relative handful of people globally. There are 10 tracks on the album (43 minutes) and 3 of them are "brand new". In fact one is a very old song so in a way that´s new as well as few people will have heard it. So there are 6 of the demo songs on the album really, re-recorded and benefiting from a year´s worth of being played live - they have adapted from the demo versions. Also, this time around there are no acoustic or keyboard parts anywhere on the album (and very little clean-sounding guitars in fact), so it is full-on. We wanted the songs recorded as we play them live so the album has a raw edge to it. It is not over produced either - you can hear everything and sonically it sounds like it should sound to my ears. I love good productions (Rammstein, White Zombie, Type-O etc.) but this band doesn't sound like that in reality. We kept some of the new songs back, as well as a cover version for a future release...
When will be the album out?
We are told that it will be available late June or early July, so not too long now! Shellshock are confirmed as one distributor and others are being lined up as well so hopefully we will get it out everywhere soon. The artwork and tracklist are online now and there will be audio samples available soon at the MySpace and at www.forruin.com - we should have new shirts and stuff out in time for the album release as well. We are playing with Napalm Death in our home town in August and we have a slot with another big DM band in November that will be annouced soon. A lot of dates will be confirmed to support the album, nationally and internationally I hope!
You were featured on an unsigned-special CD by Terrorizer last year. Did it have a positive impact on the band’s reputation?
Yes, definitely – people contacted the band from the world over. It was a very worthwhile exercise – and watch out for more Terrorizer coverage for FR in the near future!
You have played a lot of shows last year. Which was the most memorable gig? And why?
We played a lot, yes its true. We played with Decapitated, Destruction, Primordial, Mourning Beloveth, Madder Mortem and many others. We were booked to play with Rotting Christ but that fell through unfortunately. The Winterfest show in Cork just before xmas was great as I think a lot of people in our home town saw how far we had come and improved. They are all memorable for me because we get to do what we enjoy most!
You released a live DVD. Please tell us about it.
Yes it’s filmed on two cameras, nicely edited with good sound, menus and a photo gallery. It came out really well. Its the Winterfest show mentioned above – it cost us very little to film and looked so good that we decided to get a limited number of copies made up. They may be collector’s items in the future ha ha! It looks great though, and shows the band playing a selection of songs from the first 3 demos and one brand new song called Frailty.
Bands don’t often release live albums or DVDs when they have got only demos out previously. How did this idea come up?
Well a couple of camera guys were going to be there and we paid to have the show filmed. One of the promoters is a fan of FR and he edited it for us – and did a great job! Its a nice document of the band at this point – that’s what every release any band puts out (be it audio or video) is – a snapshot of the band at that time. Its nice to have. We have some other footage as well (this is the media age!) on video as well as audio, so maybe they will be useful in the future!
Have you sold many copies so far?
It was limited to 50 copies – there are about 20 copies left i think.
Beside recording your first full-length album, what are For Ruin’s plans for 2007?
Well it will be a busy year for the band for sure. We will launch the album in Dublin in early summer I hope, get more shirts printed and play lots of shows. We have the chance of playing Scotland in September I think, and we would like to play some UK shows. We will be recording 15 songs for the album and as I say, 11 or so will be on the album. The current idea is to keep back 3 or 4 songs for an MCD later in the year, with a video to be included on the MCD. We’ll see what happens there. We have plans for the video, and it will be a song from the album, so i suppose the MCD will be like an extended single (possibly Wak) or something. That’s what we hope to do anyway. On a personal note I will be a first-time-father (all going well!) in early August, so band things will be quiet for a while around then!
Thanks a lot for your time! Anything you would like to add?
Yes, thanks for the interview again! FR will be featured on the What’s Metal? Radio show (Osnabruck, DE) on March 1st so anyone living up there can check it out. The interview is also online at www.forruin.com I think. We are also doing a lot of other national and international press (including an upcoming Terrorizer feature I hope) at the moment so watch out! Cheers! J & FR.
Official For Ruin website
Official For Ruin myspace page
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