Bill: How’s the tour going?
Adem: The tour is fucking awesome man. Going on tour with Soulfly is especially cool because the fans are so open minded and are generally into other types of music. They’re into metal and even into some of the tribal stuff so when we get up and play they are really open to what we do.

Bill: What bands influenced you growing up?
Adem: Tons of bands. I was a big Rage Against the Machine fan. Rage was probably one of the first main stream bands I was into. I listened to a lot of Pantera was I was young and a lot of Antrax. On the hip hop side, I listened to NWA, Ice Cube, Public Enemy. All types of stuff. When you get older you start listening to more intelligent stuff. As far as hardcore bands I listen to a lot of Bloodlet, Snapcase, Earth Crisis.

Bill: Any vocalist you looked up to?
Adem: Yeah, Phil Anselmo, Zack from Rage, and Scott from Bloodlet, especially lyrically.

Bill: How exactly did you guys get signed?
Adem: Well we were on Eulogy for a couple years; we released an EP and a full length record. We’ve been in the process of writing our new record for about 2 years and we demoed four of the tracks and sent them to Ferret we knew someone we were friends with or whatever. They were into it and said they could push it. In hardcore music it’s like ‘hey man, you like what I’m doing? Want to put it out?’ In hardcore music it’s not as complicated as some people think it is. In my experience if the label is giving you the run around, they’re not interested. If someone is genuinely interested they’ll come out to your shows, take you out to eat and you’re pretty set.

Bill: How is the writing process for you guys?
Adem: A lot of the stuff we do sitting in a basement. We have an eight track recorder, a drum machine, guitars and a mic hooked up to the whole thing. Basically Kevin, our guitar player sits there and busts out riffs. We put some vocal patterns over it and go back and write lyrics. Sometimes I’ll write lyrics straight up and add them to music, but sometimes I write vocal patterns and then I write lyrics to the patterns. It just depends on the song and the mood. A lot of people will say some of our songs so different from each other and it’s because when we write we don’t do it the same way. We never do it the same way twice.

Bill: What do you like and dislike about your past demos/albums?
Adem: I like the fact that when we wrote them we were…when you’re young you just try crazy shit and just the feeling of writing really chaotic music and not giving a fuck. But what I don’t like is almost the same thing, there’s not as much structure and not as much flow to the song. That’s what we got on our new record, the way we wrote it man. It took a lot longer to write it because we put a lot more emphasis on the song structure and things like that. That’s what I really enjoy now, songs that sound really chaotic and are really intense.

Bill: What is the craziest thing that’s ever happened on tour?
Adem: We have crazy stories but nothing too insane. I think the Soulfly – Ill Nino thing is the craziest thing that’s happened lately.

Bill: What’s your favourite song to play live?
Adem: Track 7, it’s called “The Train Bridge”.

Bill: What do you like and dislike about touring?
Adem: I live being my own boss and playing music for a living. I like the fact that we have this art and we sell it to people and that’s all it is. There’s no paper work involved, it’s not like I have a report due at 8 o’clock the next day. It’s not a 9 to 5 job. I’m doing something that I love and I just go on the road and do it. What I don’t like is waking up in a van after driving for eight hours. Actually what I don’t like is getting woken up at 2am when it’s my shift to drive.

Bill: What’s the first thing you do when you come home from touring?
Adem: I sleep all day. It’s so weird man. I watch a lot of TV too because I don’t watch TV on tour.

Bill: How was the video you guys made?
Adem: It was cool. It was really surreal, like you show up to the video set and there’s a twelve person crew, catering, lights, cameras; it was totally like a real video shoot. For us coming from where we come from, an underground music scene or whatever, doing something like that was completely crazy.
Bill: Did you guys have any say in how it went?
Adem: Oh yeah. I worked with the director, who did videos for Hatebreed, Candira and Most Precious Blood. We talked on the phone for a few weeks prior to shooting. What we really wanted to do was just show us playing our music, we didn’t want any actors. Every video is like a guy and a girl making out and that’s just not us. For us, for our first video we were like we wrote this music so we want to show everyone what it’s all about. We have an intense performance.

Bill: Thanks man. Have a nice show.
Adem: Thanks.

Back to Interviews Directory
Click here to launch BeyondReflection (main page) in a new window.