MESHUGGAH Guitarist: No New Album Before 2011

Guitarist Mårten Hagström of Swedish experimental extreme metallers MESHUGGAH was recently interviewed for the Sonisphere web site. A few excerpts from the chat follow below.

Q: You were just discussing your new music with Robert Trujillo from METALLICA. Can you tell us a bit more about it?

Hagström: We never write as such while we're on the road. What we've got is some leftovers from the last album that we could work on and pick up again. We're playing around with some loose ideas and I've got a couple that I'll start to work on when I get back home. But as far of really getting into it and just mashing away, that's going to happen in late August.

Q: How many tracks do you reckon you've got?

Hagström: I'd say right now we have one track that needs to be remodelled and then it's good to go. Apart from that, it's just bits and pieces right now.

Q: How long will it be before we get to hear the new stuff?

Hagström: Well, we're a really slow band. A lot of times there're four years between albums. Sometimes it has to do with the writing process itself, sometimes it's to do with the technical stuff, like how to go about the recording it. This one I'm thinking will be another two years — hopefully it's shorter.

Q: You've had a lot of critical acclaim in underground circles, but haven't quite crossed over into the mainstream yet. Are you planning to make the next album a little more accessible?

Hagström: No. There's very little consciousness involved in our song writing. What I mean by that is that we're very aware of what we do musically, but we're trying to cater to our own tastes. We're trying to keep our selves interested and listen to whatever comes up in our heads. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Whenever we get asked that question it's like how do we go about breathing. I do it, but I don't really know how or where it comes from. But, no, I don't think the next album is going to be more mainstream or accessible.

Q: You have a penchant for making new instruments and on "Catch Thirtythree" used a drum machine instead of a kit. Should we expect new instruments on the next album?

Hagström: For this one I don't think they'll be any. It's always been something that has come up because we needed to get something out of something else. For instance, with the eight-string guitars, people are like, "That's a lot of strings, why do you have them?" In reality, we've got the old guitar six-string setting on there because we need to play old stuff and so we have more ground to cover. But what we wanted was a longer scale and a baritone kind of approach to an electric guitar for the tone to get real down low and still have consistency. It was something we were lacking in our sound that we couldn't really find, so we were trying with some other guys that build guitars to find ways that would make it work, so it would sound correct.

Read more from the Sonisphere web site.

Video footage of MESHUGGAH performing at the Fortarock festival 2009, which was held July 11 in Nijmegen, Holland, can be viewed below (clip shot by Christiaan Mulder).