NILE Mainman Discusses Making Of 'Ithyphallic' Album

Keyser from French webzine Thrashocore recently conducted an interview with NILE mainman Karl Sanders. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Thrashocore: How is "Ithyphallic" compared to the previous albums? I heard a few samples and they seemed close to "Annihilation of the Wicked" …so what do you think about this new album?

Karl: I think this album represents capitalizing on all of the things we learnt while we were making "Annihilation of the Wicked". How to make records and how to take death metal in place, make it listenable, make it so you can hear stuff. But there were still a lot of things, you know, as much as we like "Annihilation of The Wicked", things we thought we could do better. And there was a kind of a fuel, a fire that burnt, that kind of pushed us while we were making "Ithyphallic". How to make the drums so you can hear all the drums, make the guitar riffs nice and clean on a record and how to get the vocals to do it they're really aught to…And death metal is a tough musical form to capture and do it well. There are moments on some of our past records where we were doing these incredible things with the guitar and drums and the sound wasn't quite clear enough so at the end it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. So what we tried to do with "Ithyphallic" was take the music and make it so the people can hear what we‘re doing. 'Cause if people don't hear it they might also not even play cause they're not to get in it. They're getting in something kinda like it but not the real fucking thing. It's like, you know, sex with a condom on.

Thrashocore: How did the writing process go? Did you write all the stuff or did you share work with the other members, especially Dallas?

Karl: Dallas and I wrote all the stuff on it and George contributed his drum parts. When Dallas and I were writing the songs, we'd made a demo with the guitar and quick drums and we give that to George like early in the day and by the time it would be time for rehearsal at night, he would have come up with new drum parts to go with the songs and we go, we're trying out, we kind of hold the songs together a little bit so in some way it is a group effort but definitely Dallas and I wrote the genesis of the songs.
Thrashocore: So George Kollias lives in America now?

Karl: No, he's still living in Greece but he flew over for rehearsals. He flies over for rehearsals or for a tour or when we want to write songs. I think first trip over he came for eight weeks to work and write any songs then took a little break at home then came back for another six weeks of pre-production then we did the album and then we get to go home.

Thrashocore: From what I've heard, you sing much less than before, it's Dallas who does most of the vocals on the new. There were three singers in the past so don't you think the new album could suffer from a lack of diversity as far as vocals are concerned?

Karl: I would say that we did what was right for the songs. The vocals, we got Dallas who does the main, I do a little bit and Chris Lollis, our new bass player, he does something on the new record too. In the past, we did a lot of three vocals, always rotating, spread up very evenly. But this record didn't seem to call for that. I think these songs needed a very direct approach. Sometimes, when the vocals are trading back and forth, it's a very cool effect but I don't say that every album has to do that. We've already done that, it was time to do something a little bit different. I really liked some of the things that Dallas was doing. He's an extremely talented vocalist, he can enounciate the words very clearly and he's very right on the beats even with complex vocal rythms. Man, it's, BANG (hitting his hand with his fist),right on the money! And he can do that like with the guitars, with the craziness in our guitars, he can still do the crazy vocals and do it all.

Read the entire interview at this location.