MESHUGGAH Drummer Talks About Upcoming Studio Album, Possible DVD

Katrina of Greece's Metal Temple magazine recently conducted an interview with MESHUGGAH drummer Tomas Haake. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Metal Temple: You recently made a remix of RAMMSTEIN's "Benzin". How did you come to be involved in that?

Tomas Haake: "Well, they asked us. We don't really know the guys and we're not really fans of their music. What we are though are really fans of their ideas of doing things. I have the greatest respect for those guys because they put all the money that they make right back into pyro. They're more or less broke because they put whatever money they make back into pyro and that just amazes me. There aren't a lot of bands that do that, so that's something we definitely respect but we're not fans of their music. But they asked us and Universal Music sent us the song that they wanted us to do the remix for and we thought it sucked, their version of it. But we figured, 'Why the hell not?! Let's give it a shot,' because we've never really done things like that before, but we figured let's try at least. So that's what we did and I think it turned out pretty cool. Have you heard it?"

Metal Temple: No, unfortunately I haven't.

Tomas Haake: "It's really slow and it's not all MESHUGGAH but you can definitely hear it in there. We took most of what they had out of there. We basically only used their lead vocals from their recording. Apart from that, we made all new drums, all new riffs and it's like half the tempo. It's like super heavy and sludgy. Check it out, I think you'll like it. But their original version of it, I don't like it."

Metal Temple: When can we expect another album?

Tomas Haake: "After this tour, we start writing again, which was what we were gonna do this last spring when we were done with 'Catch 33' because we weren't gonna tour for it. We were just gonna take like three weeks off and go right back into rehearsal and start writing but now we did this tour after all. So, this winter we start writing for the next one. We're definitely gonna take our time with this one though because we did a few mistakes in the past, as most bands have, like with the 'Chaosphere' album, we accepted the SLAYER tour so we had to rush the recording and the production suffered from it, I think. And the same thing for the 'Nothing' album. We would have needed at least another three months for that album and when we had already gone into the studio for the recording, we got the offer to play Ozzfest and we accepted. But the album suffered from it, I think, especially production-wise. We had to rush it real bad. We just didn't have any time for anything, not to even reflect on what we were doing. We recorded the vocals in like seven days and for 'Chaosphere'. We used eleven weeks for the vocals, so there's a big difference. For the mix we used two days and then we mastered the day after. Then the morning after that, we flew out to Ozzfest. So it was pretty crazy. We never had the time to listen to it or anything and normally we use like two weeks for mixing and then stay off it for a week or two, then master it. That's like the way we would prefer to do it at least. But this was like record and once the recording was done the next day, do two days of mastering then take off to the U.S. So, it was pretty crazy. This time we're definitely going to take our time and not have any tour offers distract us, hopefully. So yeah, we're gonna take our time for this album, which unfortunately we're not fast songwriters. Writing this type of music usually takes us quite a lot of time, so I would think that the better part of 2006 would be us writing and recording. But then again, like after that, we're gonna tour more seriously. Like we still haven't been to Australia or Japan or South America, so we're gonna try to do the whole world next time over and do Europe and the U.S. probably at least a few times each. So we're looking at doing maybe two years of touring after that album, that is our plan at least. So hopefully like late 2006 or early 2007. It seems weird because it's still 2005 [Laughs]. A lot of bands just go to the studio for three weeks and they write as they get there, then they record and they're done and for us one song could take a month just to write one song."

Metal Temple: Are there any plans for a live album or DVD?

Tomas Haake: "Yeah, we have plans for that too. Unfortunately we don't have the material like live performance recordings or anything to release that prior to the touring after the next album, so it's probably not going to happen until like 2007. And if we do a thing like that, we really want to do it professionally and get like 6 or 7 cameras out and record like 10 shows and have a separate audio rig for that as far as recording devices go — like use ProTools or something to bring that out. It's gonna cost a lot of money but we don't see any point in releasing like a half shady bad sounding DVD. We want to do it all out in that case. It's in the plans, but it's not gonna happen within the next year."

Read the entire interview at Metal-Temple.com.