EPICA Guitarist Says 'The Quantum Enigma' Is 'Kind Of A New Beginning' For The Band

LiveReviewer recently conducted an interview with guitarist Isaac Delahaye of Dutch symphonic metallers EPICA. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

LiveReviewer: First off, I would like to congratulate you on the new [EPICA] album ["The Quantum Enigma"]. It's turned out beautifully and I had to keep myself from banging along. It's a great album and that's putting it lightly.

Isaac: We are very proud of it ourselves. Usually by the last recorded note, I'm already looking for things that could have been done better. I've been recording for sixteen years and this the first time that I really feel that we have created what we wanted, so we are very satisfied.

LiveReviewer: The album was really, well organic. It all fitted together perfectly, the songs were a whole. The previous album was very good, but this is the first time in a while that I really felt that it was an amazing album.

Isaac: Well, it's always strange to say something like that about your own album, so it's cool that you mention it, because it was a real band effort. I think that's the reason why it fits together so well. We really worked on all the details. Of course, it was like that before as well, because there have always been a lot of details in our music. But I think that this time we really worked together as a three-piece of drum, bass and guitar and sat down together and nailed down the basis together and after that the rest comes in.

LiveReviewer: One thing I noticed is that it's a pretty deep album, with a lot of layers and it feels big and bombastic. Yet it never feels pretentious. That's the great thing about it, it's a deep album, yet accessible. The listener that wants to get more out of it will be able to do so.

Isaac: I think that "Requiem For The Indifferent" was less accessible, less straightforward and I think that the fact that we've recorded in this studio now and for the first time recorded without [producer] Sascha [Paeth] has added to that as well.

LiveReviewer: That's what caught me right away at first. Was that a conscious decision? Of course, Joost (van den Broek) has delivered some great albums.

Isaac: Certainly. EPICA has been around for ten, eleven years. Then we had "Retrospect", which was about looking back, and then we thought that if we wanted to continue for ten more years, we would have to make some changes. Nothing against Sascha, of course, he even helped with some vocals and other stuff, so he has been helping us with the album, though not as a producer.

LiveReviewer: One thing that really struck me is that the album sounds different. I came here expecting to listen to a new EPICA album, bombastic and symphonic as always but it sounds… well, "refreshing." And the music sounds a lot more "heroic." Not like superheroes, but more like the classical mythology. As if you're listening to a soundtrack to grand deeds. Yet other bands, like RHAPSODY, often put the soundtrack part too much into the picture, diverting attention from the song itself. Here it really was a "soundtrack song," rather than a song that had a soundtrack heaped on to it.

Isaac: It was very much our intention to really make songs. It was because we started with putting a lot of effort into the basics and we gave a lot of attention to the band part, more so than before. And, of course, Jacob Hansen mixed it and he knows how to do these things. We tried out several people and had them do a test mix of certain songs and he came out on top. It's become a heavy album, yet all the details are there. Previously, we used to go to the studio, tune our stuff and then we recorded an album. This time we did a long pre-production in the studio and we got to check out a lot of different combinations of amps and then we could record it. Previously, we just did everything in our home studios and sent each other the parts. And after that we would go into the studio and that's it. But now we sat down together and discussed a lot more, it was more of a band effort. It was working together, rather than reacting. Everyone brought songs to the table, which was very cool. With the previous album, it was mostly Mark, Coen and me writing a lot. And now even Ariën joined in and that made it all feel refreshing. It's odd to say, but it's kind of a new beginning.

Read the entire interview at LiveReviewer.