SCULPTURED: An In-Depth Interview With DON ANDERSON

By: Scott Alisoglu

We've not heard from SCULPTURED since 2000's acclaimed "Apollo Ends" album. But it's not like head honcho Don Anderson (guitars, vocals) has been twiddling his thumbs. In addition to the steady climb of his other band AGALLOCH (The End Records),which included an increasing number of live performances, the man has been furthering his education at the collegiate level.

Finally, the time for a new SCULPTURED disc arrived and Anderson assembled several new musicians for the effort, including keyboardist Andy Winter (WINDS, AGE Of SILENCE),drummer Dave Murray (ESTRADASPHERE, DESERTS OF TRAUN, THOLUS),bassist Jason Walton (AGALLOCH, ESPECIALLY LIKELY SLOTH),and vocalist Tom Walling. The product is 39 minutes of complex, avant-garde, and uncannily tuneful music called "Embodiment". The beauty of the album is in its creators' ability to align atonal and challenging arrangements with infectious melodies without making it seem as though anything is out of place or unnecessarily juxtaposed. Don Anderson spoke to me by phone from Seattle to discuss his new masterpiece.

Q: I know it's been eight years since "Apollo Ends" was released. Why the long wait? I assume part of that had to do with AGALLOCH taking your focus.

Don Anderson: Yeah, AGALLOCH taking off was a big factor, particularly after we recorded "The Mantle", which was a very long process, both the songwriting and recording. The End was ready to start doing small tours and asked us if we could play live. We thought about it for a while and made it happen, so that took some time. Then I went off to graduate school and that took up a lot of my time. So any extracurricular time I had I just pushed into AGALLOCH, which I was perfectly happy with because I consider SCULPTURED and AGALLOCH to be equally important to me. There is no competition between the two because I can express a lot in AGALLOCH that I can't in SCULPTURED. I figured with the success of AGALLOCH I'll just go ahead and ride that wave and return to SCULPTURED when I felt ready. There were just a lot of things going on and AGALLOCH taking off.

Q: Your degrees are in English.

Don Anderson: Yeah, I have a bachelor's and a master's. I'm doing my doctorate right now.

Q: SCULPTURED is the more personal of the two projects. I'm sure it takes a different kind of mindset to create the music of SCULPTURED.

Don Anderson: Yeah. With SCULPTURED I write the lyrics and the themes, the philosophy or whatever; they're all my own. Whereas with AGALLOCH I have a lot to do with the music, but the imagery and themes and philosophy are all on John [Haughm].

Q: With this relative level of notoriety for AGALLOCH, did that translate into added incentive or motivation with your work in SCULPTURED?

Don Anderson: It definitely wasn't motivation, but I'm definitely thankful for the notoriety that AGALLOCH has because I think that will help SCULPTURED get more notice than it would had I not also been a member of AGALLOCH. I definitely realize that it's going to widen my audience. It does inspire me because I realize there are going to be more people interested in it because of the involvement of myself and Jason. But the motivation is really just that I finally had the time and I felt revitalized to do another album. At first I didn't want to do a metal album. I was trying to find new ways to do music, but I figured, "no, I do metal best, so I'm just going to do it and do the best I can."

Q: The five songs on "Embodiment" were penned over what period of time?

Don Anderson: The one song, "The Shape of Rage", was a song I'd immediately written following "Apollo Ends". I wrote it out on sheet music and I hung onto it because I also liked it, and then I wrote two other songs after that just didn't go anywhere and that's where I kind of lost the motivation. But I've always had that sheet music lying around and it got stored away, and I found it in probably 2003. So I relearned it and started thinking more about it. I got some new computer software and got rid of the 4-track, and that opened up a lot more possibilities of tracking at home and facilitated working with Dave from down in San Francisco and Andy in Vancouver, and Jason in Portland because I'm in Seattle. A lot of it was just the facilitation being able to happen with the computer.

Q: Speaking of which, three of these guys — Dave, Andy, and Tom — are new to the project.

Don Anderson: Yes, although I've known Tom since high school. We actually were in a band together.

Q: How did you end up bringing these folks together for "Embodiment"?

Don Anderson: Jason and I are fans of ESTRADAPHERE and Jason had been in contact with Dave Murray, the former drummer, and Dave was looking for people for a project, which turned into THOLUS. And that's how I got into contact with him, although I couldn't help him with that. But when it came around to SCULPTURED, I've always loved CYNIC and ATHEIST, Sean Reinert and that sort of drumming. Dave kind of specializes in that; it's his influence as well. He's a studio guy so I just said "how much?" and "do you want to do it?" and he gave me a very good deal, so I sent him the tracks, and he did it. I didn't hear the drums until they were done. I gave him full creative license, whatever he wanted.

Andy is a little funnier of a story. Him and I used to hang out when I lived up north in Bellingham, Washington. He was in Vancouver, B.C. So we used to visit and hang out and I thought, "Well, I'll have him do a keyboard solo." So I sent him the songs, and this was like four months until I finished recording the album; I'd already done the guitars at this time. I sent him the actual guitar and drum tracks. The one song "Bodies without Organs", I said, "do a solo here." He sent it back having played keyboards on everything, except that spot [laughs], which at first I thought was presumptuous and that he was trying to take over the album. But I happened to absolutely love what he did. In all reality, I would have asked him, but the guy is super busy, he's got tons of bands. He's working with superstars like Hellhammer, and I figured he wouldn't want to work with me [laughs]. But he said "send me another track and let me see what I can do," and so I just kept sending him tracks and he kept sending them back with tons of keys on them, and they were awesome. I think the only things I asked for were maybe different keyboard sounds, but I pretty much kept everything he did, although he took like a ton of takes for the solo. So it was kind of ironic that the solo was the last thing he did. That was purely serendipitous; it happened at the last minute.

Q: And you said Tom you've known for years.

Don Anderson: Yeah, I had another singer [Brian Yager] and he'd gotten more religious over time, kind of out of music, and didn't want to sing the lyrics. So I just got my buddy Tom.

Q: How much more religious?

Don Anderson: Well, he's always been religious, but I think he's getting more religious as he grows older. He took issue with some of the existential themes of the album, which is fine.

Q: Jason, or JWW, is the mainstay. He also writes for some metal publications.

Don Anderson: Yeah, he's AGALLOCH, SCULPTURED, he does Metal Maniacs and did stuff or Unrestrained! He used to do stuff for Terrorizer a long time ago.

Q: We were talking about Andy's keyboards, and they make all the difference in the world on this album. They are no more important than any other instrument, but their absence would completely change the sound and feel of the disc.

Don Anderson: Oh yeah. Like I said, they were total last minute. I'd written this album, recorded all the guitar parts, and didn't have any plans for keys. If you mute on the keys you'd probably hear what would have happened had I not asked Andy to do a little solo [laughs]. It was just luck, it was chance that it was the right window that he could jump in and do it.

Q: Andy wrote his own parts. What about the other guys? Did they all contribute?

Don Anderson: Oh yeah, I really enjoy, almost as a compositional strategy, to give the people I collaborate with a hundred percent freedom. In fact, I even prefer it if I don't get to even hear it until it's too late. I prefer to make myself learn my music again. So I send the rhythm tracks to Dave, he sent it back with these crazy drums. He's going to put things in double time that I think would have been in half time and vice versa. He's going to do polyrhythms and whatnot, and weird double bass patterns, and none of it would have been anything I anticipated, but now that I have them and they're done I have to relearn it. It's a way of forcing myself to continue to appreciate the music that I do and learn to see it in new ways. It also makes that album more and more disconnected from us, so it's kind of its own entity. I didn't hear the bass parts until Jason was in front of me recording them. I kind of like that. I like hearing things that I could have never anticipated and learning to appreciate them. So everybody wrote their own parts. I wrote the vocals and worked with Tom on vocal melodies.

Q: You're in the midst of these songs, which are quite long, and then it's over in 39 minutes. The initial thought is that the album seems like it should be so much longer because of the complexity involved, but then you realize if it was in fact longer, it wouldn't have the same impact.

Don Anderson: Exactly. I was exhausted by the time I finished the last song. I couldn't do anymore. It's too many notes. I would sometimes joke with John in AGALLOCH that SCULPTURED is like AGALLOCH compressed. AGALLOCH is like gum, you know, stretch it out. That's why my albums are 39 minutes and AGALLOCH albums are like 70.

Q: It certainly makes it easier to absorb in one sitting. Of course, it's relative, considering the kind of music involved.

Don Anderson: Sure. In AGALLOCH we space things out, take our time, and things develop, it's more minimal. So time is a real major part of it, but yeah, I agree.

Q: So when it's all said and done did this album feel a lot different when you were recording it, aside from Andy's keys, compared to "Apollo Ends"?

Don Anderson: Yeah, and with "Apollo Ends" we actually rehearsed as a live band, not for live shows, but when recording and writing. "Apollo Ends" was during the time when we were writing [AGALLOCH's] "Pale Folklore". We would literally be in John's basement and play through the songs from "Pale Folklore" and then switch to the songs on "Apollo Ends" because John was also on that album. So that was much more of a band thing, whereas this was a very disembodied experience, so I guess that's fitting for the album.

Q: Before I actually listened to the album, I had a vague expectation of what I was getting into. But for as complex as the compositions sound, they were also much more accessible than I expected. It's not as jarring as I would have expected.

Don Anderson: I agree. Particularly the choruses are very catchy. I don't know how that happened [laughs]. It's so weird how it happened. It's almost pop. Partly it's that Tom's older than me. He grew up with VAN HALEN; he grew up with that kind of stuff. As a funny story, I say the word "body" a lot and he would tend to say it like a glam pop singer, like "Bod-aayy!" I had to stop him and say "No, no, no, you can do the more clean vocals, but you've got to pronounce it straight, otherwise it's VAH HALEN" [laughs]. His voice might come from that, but I grew up, since I was eight or nine years old, on IRON MAIDEN, which is about as traditional as you can get.

Q: You're right, there are some very catchy songs on here, including "Take My Body Apart" and "The Shape of Rage".

Don Anderson: I'm glad. I think the catchiness is what is sort of able to sneak in during the more dissonant and jarring moments.

Q: And that's what is so enthralling about it, the coming together of those two worlds. I'm not really sure if I've heard it done quite as well as this, at least for some time now. It's got to be a tough thing to pull off with so many disparate elements. Quite honestly, many bands that try it completely screw it up, and it becomes this mess of disjointed parts.

Don Anderson: Well, thank you very much. I'm very pleased to hear that.

Q: So your intent wasn't to make this quite as accessible, but instead dissonant and jolting?

Don Anderson: Yeah, I think so. I really set out to do that. It think bands like GORGUTS with "Obscura" did that really, really well. I kind of put myself in that category a little bit, but I probably don't know what I'm talking about [laughs]. What I end up writing is what it is; it is what it is. To some extent I can't help what I write. If something sounds super poppy/melodic, I just go with it. I really like to think that part of what sets me apart from other bands is sort of influenced by contemporary classical music and the avant-garde. But I'm certainly no FANTOMAS or GORGUTS [laughs].

Q: "Progressive" is a term that is relevant to the album and there are death metal elements, though outside of the death growls it is not a dominant element, in my opinion. It is surely a heavy album though. How do you feel about descriptors like "progressive rock" or "death metal" as it pertains to your band?

Don Anderson: It's always a hard question, but I love death metal and it's music I listen to a lot. I'm perfectly happy with it and I've always wanted to play death metal. The influence is definitely there, so I don't mind it. Progressive rock, when I hear that term, in many ways I think of both a nation and an era: '70s Italian, late '60s Kraut rock Germany, the UK of course from the '70s, or Sweden from the '90s and also the '70s. All those sort of bands were really advancing the sound, very complex in many ways, so I'm happy in that family. Progressive metal, I don't know what that is; I think of DREAM THEATER. And there is also a lot of power metal that sort of masquerades as progressive metal, which I don't like. The word "progressive" is not like a genre of music in the sense that metal or folk or something is. It has positive connotations.

Q: Eclectic and avant-garde are probably better words to describe the music of SCULPTURED.

Don Anderson: Sure, eclectic I like very much.

Q: I'm also in awe of how busy the drumming sounds, and yet here again the album would not work without it. He's doing a lot on the album, to which you alluded earlier.

Don Anderson: Yeah, he is. I gave him total freedom, but I'd also give him suggestions like, "hey, I hear double bass here." For example, the chorus of "Bodies without Organs" is a very simple [makes double-bass sound]. A common death metal band would do double bass, like METALLICA's "One". That's what I heard, but I'm not a hip, crazed drummer. He was like "I want to be able to do those sorts of things, but not with double bass." He wanted to do those tropes, those aspects of death metal, but he didn't want to do it with bass drums. I don't know what he did with it because I didn't see him do it. It sounds like he's hitting every part of the drum kit. But he still mimics those 16th note machinegun fills. He's just doing it using other parts of the kit, which I really, really appreciate. I think he tracked the drums in two days. He's just a phenomenal drummer. The first two ESTRADASPHERE albums he's just fantastic on.

Q: And it's not a background rhythm thing; it's right up front with the other instruments. It's loud, but not too loud, just like all the other instruments. You really got some nice instrument separation on the album, which is also difficult to do without having it sound muddy.

Don Anderson: It was a long mixing process. It was mixed in Los Angeles. Paul McKee would send me tracks, and we'd kick it around for a while, then he'd send them back. He worked long and hard on it.

Q: You've talked about a style of composing called the matrix system. Would you discuss this process?

Don Anderson: It's adapted from a much larger, complex system called 12-tone music. The Western musical scale has 12 tones all together, including all the accidentals. Instead of saying you're going to write a song in D Minor then modulate to B Flat major for the chorus, you would choose an ordering of those 12 tones. You might do it with patterns or sheets or whole numbers, or whatever. And you would build a matrix from that tone row but putting an inversion of that row on the left-hand side and make this huge box of notes. But when I tried to do that with metal it didn't work too well, I needed to limit it. So I developed a row of four tones so I'd get little boxes. When you play those four notes on guitar you can still hear the four notes pretty clearly, but much beyond that it starts to sound like mud. I would just pull patterns and orderings of notes from the box. So what happens is the matrix becomes a little production factory in that it gives me all the notes in a certain order. I don't have to accept what it gives me, but there is a rule that I can't repeat any note until I've played all the ones in front of it. Every song you hear on the radio is the same chord progression mostly.

Every system you use has limitations and constraints, and I wanted to break free of the restraints that were on key signatures. Whenever you pick up the guitar your hand grabs the fret board and you start playing things that are unconscious, you just do it and fall into patterns, and I was doing that. Part of the reason I took so long with SCULPTURED is I didn't want to keep doing the same damn riffs, so I forced myself use this sort of system. So I would write the music on paper first and then learn it myself. I was forced to work outside my comfort zone. So I played riffs I could have never written without this system.

Q: This whole process kind of transcends music. You're challenging yourself and always pushing the limits. That's kind of your modus operandi, isn't it?

Don Anderson: Exactly. In terms of composition, but also in terms of collaboration. I kind of promised myself that whatever Dave gives me I have to work with. If I have to change what I'm doing, then I'll change what I'm doing to fit him. It's like choosing your own limitations and then working within them.

Q: Ideas like dissonance and the atonal nature of certain forms of music in which you are interested, in general terms I think that maybe people not exposed to these disharmonious sounds may have certain conceptions of it. But atonal structures are not necessarily anathema to good composition. There are always ways to make it work.

Don Anderson: It does sound like a radical claim, but I really believe that music is not natural, not innate. If you grew up listening to 12-tone music or atonal music I firmly believe it would sound like "Happy Birthday" to you. But we all grow listening to commercials and lullabies and things that are very, very harmonic and tonal. So that gets to the nature-nurture argument. I think if we grew up listening to the avant-garde… I mean the more I listen to my music the more it sounds natural or normal.

Q: What about the album's lyrical theme, like the physiological and I also heard some religious references? The artwork is part and parcel to it as well.

Don Anderson: The lyrics have recurring themes. "Apollo Ends" does as well. I started writing lyrics and I don't feel like I've ever touched on everything I wanted to touch on. With this album the main themes are the body, death, sickness, God, and the body as a symbol of God's work, but also the gradual breakdown of the way that sign is organized, or the organs, the meaning of the body. Entropy is probably the biggest inspiration and had a great deal of impact on not only my music, but also life. It just all gradually breaks down. But it's also sadness and existential crisis as well. I don't believe in God, but if there is something then we have a lot to answer for.

Q: Any plans for live performance?

Don Anderson: No, it's just not possible. I'd have to get another guitarist, maybe another two guitarists, and obviously with the members all spread it out it would be very difficult. And of course the issues with rehearsal space and time off… Any time I have offers to play live it's going to be with AGALLOCH. So I would love to play live and enjoy playing live. I'm lucky AGALLOCH can play live with the way we're set up.

Q: AGALLOCH actually did a successful European tour with NOVEMBERS DOOM.

Don Anderson: Yeah, it was wonderful. It was the first time for most of us ever being in Europe, for NOVEMBERS DOOM as well. The fans over there are very intense; it's a way of life. The clubs take wonderful care of you, you're well fed, well looked after. It's not like the States where you're lucky to get a piece of pizza. People told us that Europe is so wonderful and they take good care of you. And for driving, everything is so close together. Most of the club owners actually cooked for us, homemade meals. Good food too!

Q: As for AGALLOCH, you've got a new EP coming out, "The White EP".

Don Anderson: Yeah, the EP is supposed to be out February 29, although it was on pre-order about a month ago and might be close to selling out already. It's on Vendlus.

Q: In the way of a wrap up, would you say you're happy with where music has taken you thus far in your career?

Don Anderson: I can't believe it. When I was young I thought if maybe I could just record an album on a tiny label I was going to be happy. So I'm very, very lucky and very thankful for what I've been able to do, particularly with being able to maintain a regular life beside it. I'm actually beyond satisfied.