Tenth Planet
Tenth Planet create great music. That's a fact! This is something I've known right from the first time I listened to their new EP "The Prophet Curse". What this interview helped me realize is the substance and meanings behind this band. It opened up a window to a new horizon and allowed me to understand their music and lyrics some more. Martin, the band's singer, is the one to be held responsible for the interesting answers offered...

1. CONGRATULATIONS ON “THE PROPHET CURSE”! ARE YOU CONTENT WITH THE FINAL RESULT OR IS THERE ANYTHING YOU’D LIKE TO CHANGE?
    Hi, I’m Martin, the singer and lyricist from Tenth Planet (www.tenthplanet.ca). We are very proud of The Prophet Curse EP but before we completed the record our producer had a baby and moved half-way around the world so we were not able to do a final mix before mastering. The individual song “We are the Cause of Everything” is well mixed because a famous engineer was visiting the night after we recorded it and did a pass for fun. What you hear on the rest of the tracks are the scratch working mixes from the daily sessions which we assembled and had mastered by Joao Carvalho (who mastered Death from Above 1979 and produced Pilate). We’re pleased with the results but it would have been nice to actually mix the record in a big clear room. And there are a couple of notes in my harmonies that make me cringe every time I listen to it so I would have liked to have muted those.
2. YOU’VE WON SOME CONTEST AND YOU HAVE ACQUIRED QUITE A REPUTATION IN CANADA. TELL US A FEW THINGS ABOUT IT. WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM ALL THIS?
    We have won a couple songwriting competitions but I can’t dig this trend toward making music and storytelling a competition. The marketplace should be the only place where the competition between creators happens, but the game doesn’t start on a level playing field. It is decided in a boardroom or contest office which acts will get the push and the videos in heavy rotation and the drive-time radio slots. The buyer never gets to make a real choice – and remember, only fifteen percent of people have daily access to the internet so the myspace indie-music explosion is eighty-five percent myth or, at least, is myth to eighty-five percent of the world.
    For those of us outside the big label or government circuits there’s a whole seedy little industry that has sprung up to milk cash from indie bands. Of course there are some good people and legitimate companies and other exceptions that prove the rule but the vast majority of rock music contests have large entry fees and are get-rich-quick schemes that take advantage of the competing musicians’ desire to get rich quick themselves. Bands born wealthy can skip this whole process but unfortunately, for everybody else, the only way to get a shot at a big chunk of quality studio time or some cutting-edge new gear is through rolling the dice on shady contests and battles-of-the-bands – and it is just that, a dice roll. Not a single one is a true meritocracy, including the ones we’ve won.
    As for our reputation in Canada, well, I guess it depends on whom you.
3. LET’S SUPPOSE THAT YOU WERE ASKED TO REVIEW “THE PROPHET CURSE”. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TRYING TO BE AS OBJECTIVE AS POSSIBLE?
    It has some really strong moments where I think it does achieve the epic scope we wish it did all of the time. Some of the vocal harmonies would have met their fate with the mute button. I think the drums sound quite good except on “Shadow” where they are well played but poorly mixed. It was the first track we recorded; just before New Year’s Eve. An interesting aside is that our drummer Glenn played the shit out of “Shadow” on the day after his father’s funeral and that is the take you hear on the record. It was a great act of professionalism.
    Jeff picked the songs he was interested in recording from our catalogue of thirty or forty tunes so a lot of our heavier and/or poppier stuff remains unrecorded beyond the state of demos. I would have liked to swap a ballad for something more aggressive or club-bouncy. The record ended up being a bit of a weeper. There is a place in every collection for a good weeper, though. This may not be the kind of review you wanted but it is difficult to see one’s own work objectively.
4. WHAT’S THE BEST AND WHAT’S THE WORST PART OF YOUR MUSIC, ACCORDING TO YOU?
    The best thing about our stuff is that it lacks the self-conscious irony and scene identification infecting most rock in this moment. The worst thing about our stuff is that it lacks self-conscious irony and is not particularly derivative of any one scene and, so, is unlistenable to the post-modernists who control media access. But they can go fuck themselves right in the meme. Also, we can be more than a bit clumsy with tempo. And I sometimes can’t tell the difference, or even if there is a difference, between interesting and ludicrous – this can be applied to both my lyrics and my melodies. And to this interview. And to other things.
5. ARE THERE ANY ELEMENTS YOU’D LIKE TO ADD OR EXPERIMENT WITH IN THE FUTURE?
    There are many experiments lined up for the next time we’re in the studio. We all program, independently of each other, beats and loops with various types of equipment and software and Brian also does some interesting and very pretty keyboard pieces with ambient pad sounds. I specialize in post-production stuff, modeling effects, delays and reverbs and getting all the instruments and voices compressed and out of each others’ way.
    I’d like to use some short dialogue samples, bits from speeches and other non-musical sounds. I’d also like to use different near-silences consisting of ambient, found-sound or natural environments, digitally modeled environments or even just the old-school technique of setting up microphones in various places and laying down a track or two of room ambiance. Manipulation of these quiet underlying tracks allows the songs to exist, for the listener, within varying spaces without our having to alter the signals and tone of any of the instruments.
    These little virtual-spatial details are important because we are trying, often over the course of a single song, to transport our audience from the bottom of the sea to the bedroom and then out among the stars - to achieve what the early LSD researchers referred to as a breaking open of the head. The storytelling travels those great distances, so why not the music too? On stage, live, we can express ourselves physically to the audience and so can leave most of the processors at home. But if we the members of the band agree on one thing it is that we like the epic shit.
    I am bored by bands that spend fifty thousand dollars trying to make their record sound like it was haphazardly dumped down onto a four-track one casual semi-drunken afternoon at rehearsal. It’s the audio equivalent of skateboarding vegan rockers who wear mauve under-eye-shadow so they look like they’ve got themselves a habit. I like to trip and the tunes that make me trip hardest are not necessarily complex or atonal but are sonically and lyrically intricate. I’d like to do a track with simple organic instrumentation but with heavily processed and digitally chopped vocals. There are also many production tricks I have heard elsewhere and am eager to try and apply – pitchshifted harmonies like Radiohead’s, vocal instrumentation like Bjork’s, massive virtual and physical reverb spaces like Sigur Ros’s, multiple mics at varying gate levels like mid-Bowie. Then I’d like to try and approximate the results live. This kind of experimental drive makes record industry people chuckle into the sleeves of their black leather blazers. But why even try to do something if it isn’t a challenge?
6. WHAT AMAZED ME IN THIS RELEASE WASN’T ONLY THE GREAT SONGS AND THE OVERALL AESTHETICS, BUT ALSO THE GREAT PRODUCTION AND SOUND. DID YOU HAVE A PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE OR THE HELP OF A PROFESSIONAL?
    These tracks were produced by Jeff Martin, formerly of the Tea Party, and he is a very skilled producer and musician (www.jeff-martin.net/). He also agrees with us that getting a bit wasted can contribute to an honest performance so it was nice to not feel out of place for a change. Much of the rock scene is deceptively straight-edge and most emotion manufactured. Jeff doesn’t fake it – and, like us, he doesn’t have time for irony. We did have violent disagreements about what makes for good poetry but that kind of battling is a good thing, the best thing, for a creative working environment. He does have a very set way of doing things, though, techniques he has developed that make up “his” inimitable style, so when it came to production and choice of tones it was sometimes a bit of a struggle to get things sounding like they were ours rather than his. Our idea of heavy is more metallic and tech than big Zeppelin-style grooves - Brian has a wicked buzz-saw sound live and a way of playing crossovers between rhythm and lead parts that we didn’t really capture; had we more time I would have liked to tap Jeff’s industrial side. Some of those Tea Party tracks were pretty heavy.
    The songs took one day apiece to do all the tracking. If I remember correctly we’d do drums first with a simple guitar guide track. I’d do a guide vocal in the early afternoon, then all the other instruments would be laid down and then I’d do my main vocal tracking around midnight. It would be great to record everyone together at once but the size of room required in order to isolate the instruments for something like that, especially on a heavy song, is prohibitively expensive.
    We work fast in the studio because every hour wasted due to miscommunication between the band and the engineer or producer means dollars out of our pockets; dollars earned back at our shitty day jobs. We’ve self-produced and co-produced many times and so are now fairly fluent in studio-speak. None of us went to engineering school but we’ve all been playing for a while now and Glenn and I have both been sequencing and using MIDI interfaces and synths with computers since we were ten or twelve; starting with Commodore 64s and moving on to Mac Classics. We didn’t know each other back then, though. This makes it much easier to explain to the person at the console exactly how to manipulate a track to replicate what we in the band are hearing in our heads. Running the board yourself is a rush but I’d prefer to have a good, creative producer like Jeff or at very least a skilled engineer do so. The results will definitely be stronger.
7. TELL US A FEW THINGS ABOUT THE ALBUM LYRIC-WISE… WHAT ARE YOUR SOURCES OF INSPIRATION?
    I am interested in whether what we each think of as an individual self is truly something independent and autonomous or whether our personalities are sewn together from what we each have over a lifetime taken in through language and our senses. Do I want this woman instead of that woman because I myself think she’s more beautiful or am I just supposed to think she’s more beautiful because her style of beauty is currently in fashion?
    I write a lot of slag songs about whom or whatever I find most disgusting at the moment, like something you might hear if dime-store pop philosophers battled each other like MCs. I also write about romantic attachment and how people, in order to be in love and not kill each other, will make radical adjustments to their personalities in the same way celestial masses will change properties as their gravities swirl them in relation. This can lead to either balance or collapse in both situations.
    I guess I ape the transcendentalists – I believe that all natural systems, including our most complex patterns of emotion, operate by the same big set of universal laws - so by observing the march of armies or the motions of the planets or quartz veining granite or the blossoming of a bar brawl or the interweaving currents of a river one can develop strong theories about, to poach a line from Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything.
8. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SUGGEST WITH THE TITLE “THE PROPHET CURSE”? WE HAVE A SAYING HERE IN GREECE “NO PROPHET AT HIS PLACE” MEANING THAT NO ONE IS ACCEPTED AND RESPECTED AT HIS PLACE OF ORIGIN. DOES YOUR TITLE HAVE A SIMILAR MEANING?
    We are all history and literature buffs and the more you know about the way things have gone down in the past the greater success you’ll have in predicting the way things will unfold in the future. If one is an honest observer of the state of events at this point in time – a mass return to tribalism and fundamentalism, perpetual emotional adolescence and the commoditization of attention – it is almost impossible to make predictions that are going to make people happy. This is why prophets are unwelcome, as in your saying. They see their homes too clearly and some people there won’t like being seen clearly. Your saying and our title are sister concepts.
    Right now any unbiased prediction of events is bound to be terrifying or, if you are morbid like me, exciting. All indicators point to, at best, physical Armageddon or, at worst, a fugue state wherein nothing ever changes and people merely slot themselves into not just an intensely specialized career niche but also into pre-fabricated lifestyles constructed in emulation of some icon of the past – an idea which was described by Baudrillard and given a spit-shine for The Matrix. So it is, in these days, a curse to be a prophet because one could deliver no good news. But I would rather have prophets around than live in blissful ignorance. Nietzsche compared prophets to rock-monkeys – barely intelligent, shit-flinging and easily startled, but they can tell when a storm is coming long before you will.
9. I FIND THE COVER ARTWORK REALLY GREAT AND THOUGHT PROVOKING. HOWEVER, WOULD YOU LIKE TO DESCRIBE IT FOR THOSE THAT HAVEN’T SEEN IT? PLEASE ALSO POINT OUT ITS CONNECTION WITH THE ALBUM TITLE AND LYRICS.
    We have a friend from Germany named Marco Holtappel (www.myspace.com/holtappel) who is a digital artist and designer of websites. He ran the Tea Party website in Germany – that’s how he found out about us. He likes our stuff and volunteered to design our cover. We were astounded by the result. We made no suggestions and gave no input. It’s all Marco – he put on the record and started working.
    The cover image itself is a bit tough to describe but I will try – keep in mind that it is photorealistic: under a sickly green chemical sky like a still convectional storm stands a character who seems the result of some Dr. Moreau sort of genetic cross-breeding between men and elephants. It wears a worn tweed suit. In its delicate skeletal hands it holds an old television set tuned to a channel showing birds winging against a clear and healthy blue sky. A gnarled tree winds up the right side of the image. Ghostly flames rise from Elephant-guy’s head. I could bullshit you all day on how the image relates to the music and lyrics but it would be just that, bullshit, because I am not Marco. I have my own ideas about what it means but I’d rather people either decide for themselves or ask him. I think it’s pretty damned beautiful, though.
10. BEFORE “THE PROPHET CURSE” YOU HAD RELEASED THE “RETRO HAS NO FUTURE” EP. WHICH ARE THEIR MAIN DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES?
    On that EP as well as the preceding one we were working with a talented Electronica and R&B artist and producer named Robert Strauss (www.robertstraussmusic.com). We were all pretty green but achieved a much poppier, sunnier, and at times I think even more expansive sound than on “Prophet” and were able to do some fine detail and effects work that I think is the equal of many major releases. The mixing suite was good but the actual recording facilities were quite limited at the time so the basic tracks we were using were not of the highest audio quality.
    The most electronic single, “Slash of Blue,” actually did quite well. We had no label or management but it was our first radio song and we licensed it to a couple television shows. It also won us one of those songwriting contests I was earlier slagging. I am proud of the job we did on “Retro Has No Future” with such limited resources – it caught Jeff Martin’s educated ear so we must have done something right. I think it contains some good simple songs and clever production tricks and I’m also proud of the title, which I think is a neat little original near-Zen tautology that sums up the way I feel about postmodernism.
11. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO FROM NOW ON? ARE YOU IN SEARCH OF A LABEL? WHAT DO YOU WANT A LABEL TO OFFER YOU IN ORDER TO CUT A DEAL WITH THEM?
    Of course the dream is the major-label support, the opening-slot arena tour, the living expenses stipend, the A&R team, the ads for your record and such but the truth is that that sort of deal was always rare and is now an endangered species. Another truth is that those big deals have for a long time been huge money-losers for the vast majority of artists – if you think the label is paying for that advertisement, think again. The label is a bank and the cost of the ad or video or distribution or whatever is taken directly out of your sales. If you don’t sell enough records to break even after splitting four ways the twenty-five cents per record you’d make on a common deal you’ll still have to pay that money back out of your own pocket.
    We do have a development deal with Dead Love Records (www.deadloverecords.com/index.php), a small label from the UK, which is turning into a bit of a management deal as well. They’ve been very good to us – it’s nice to have PR materials designed with no time involvement by us arriving ready-made in boxes from Taiwan and to be able to get a loan to do our second duplication run of “Prophet.” DLR is also helping set up our European tour this fall – you can see the itinerary on their site – if you or anyone you know will be up near Amsterdam from mid-September to mid-October you can catch a show and tear it up with us. I think there are eight gigs to choose from as of now.
    The best way to make a living now as a musician is to build a loyal audience in as many towns as possible in as many countries as possible, play with other musicians you like and trust, charge a reasonable price at the door, always keep your best shit for the stage, and have a lot of different records, remixes and crazy merchandise to sell. The corporate circuit may come with higher-shelf whiskey and better-heeled tarts but you have no behavioral freedom and end up with less money if not in irredeemable debt. I’d still take it in a flash, though, just for the ride.
12. WHAT KIND OF FEEDBACK HAVE YOU RECEIVED SO FAR? WHICH WAS THE MOST FLATTERING COMMENT AND WHICH ONE DO YOU THINK HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR SOUND AND IMAGE?
    Your questions, Christine, are probably the most flattering response we’ve had. They are thoughtful and you obviously listened to and cared for the record. It’s wild that someone halfway around the world would be interested in how we wrote and made our EP. Thank you.
    At the opposite end of the spectrum, the record got a bad review from a Canadian website in Alberta – they thought it sounded “white bread” like Nickelback and Korn. I think it sounds like neither - of course, it would be nice to sell as maany records as either. I am not sure what white bread sounds like – it is fairly quiet from my experience. None of us really like either of those bands, though, so it bothered us. Then the same website reviewed our live show and said it was heavy, violent and operatic. That was much closer.
13. DO YOU HAVE ANY PLANS FOR LIVE SHOWS? WHAT SHOULD THE FANS EXPECT TO SEE AND EXPERIENCE IN YOUR SHOWS?
    They can expect excellent musicianship and heavy beats. They can expect to get the same show whether they are twenty or twenty thousand. We are playing northern Europe in September and October and we’ll be playing for both numbers – from a British biker bar to the Breda Barst popfestival (http://www.bredabarst.nl/). We are not shoegazers but we also don’t do poseur choreography where we all jump up and swing our guitars around in unison. We do not generally wear ties because they remind us of leashes and nooses. We are always coming up with ideas for stage shows using video and other projections – we have used them in the past - but we don’t have money to do that kind of stuff right now so we ourselves have to be the special effects. 
14. COULD YOU NAME SOME OF YOUR MOST BELOVED BANDS AND ALBUMS? WHO WERE THOSE MUSICIANS THAT HELPED YOU REALIZE THIS IS THE MUSIC YOU LIKE AND ENJOY THE MOST?
    I grew up just over the border from Detroit, Michigan, in the eighties and nineties so I came up with banging techno and hip-hop. Ritchie Hawtin and Carl Cox, as well as Dre and Terminator X, remain major production and career influences. My parents listened to folk singers like Stan Rogers and Harry Chapin and they definitely influenced my writing. The first rock I got into was Pink Floyd, Ministry and Alice in Chains, then Rheostatics, which are a great weirdly epic Canadian band who are funny and deadly serious at the same time. Then I really got into Radiohead. I tend to listen to one album or set of singles over and over, sometimes for weeks. Now I like too much stuff to name and want to rip off almost everybody at some point.
    My lyric style is informed more by Leonard Cohen and Rumi than by the Ramones or Elvis Costello and more by Immortal Technique and Henry Rollins than by Ron Sexsmith or Chris Martin. I think Thom Yorke is a good lyricist. I think Paul Simon was a great lyricist, before he married Edie Brickell, while Princess Leia herself was still his self-appointed “intellectual geisha.” I wonder if they ever role-played the whole Jabba thing?
    At home now I listen mainly to foreign-language vocal music and orchestral music written in the early twentieth century – Orff, Gershwin, Sibelius, Strauss, Shostakovich, Copland and Grofe are on the current playlist.
    I like rangy athletic singing. Layne Staley, Thom Yorke, Kurt Cobain, Bjork, Chris Cornell, Bono, Ritchie Havens, Chris Robinson from the Black Crowes, Martin Tielli from Rheostatics and John Fogerty all influenced my own style, along with some guys you might not expect like Anthony Williams of the original Platters and, again, Stan Rogers. I learned some very useful stuff from Jeff Martin. I like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and other Qawwali singers as well as some from Central Africa and the Caribbean. I am interested in exploring new sounds with my voice and then using them within the context of metal. I am not at all interested in making songs that sound Pakistani or Congolese or whatever I am sourcing but I am definitely interested in stealing their vocal tones for a riff or twelve. I heard the other day on internet radio some singing group from the high plains of nowhere, somewhere, who do with their voices these choruses of wind and snow and water and other high plains of nowhere sounds. That shit was sick.
    The rest of the band likes all different things. Brian is a big fan of Stone Temple Pilots, Van Halen, Dio, Black Sabbath and a million other bands. His knowledge of arena metal is encyclopedic. Glenn likes thrash like Bolt Thrower, grooves like Kyuss, heavy stuff like Rage Against the Machine, Clutch and Helmet (I also grew up on those) and we both still listen to conscious hip-hop like Immortal Technique and Mos Def, all the Green Lantern shit, which we try to force upon the other two with regularity. Teddy is still new to the band so I’m still not sure what his favorites are but I do believe he likes the heavy shit.
15. IF YOUR MUSIC WERE AN EMOTION, WHAT WOULD IT BE? IF IT WERE A PAINTING, WHAT WOULD IT SHOW?
    The first part of your question is tough to answer since the songs are themselves analyses of emotion. I guess I’d say, to bite a Richard Feynman title, “the pleasure of finding things out.”
    As for paintings, Lawren Harris to Soviet graphic design to Dali to Kandinski/Klee. I am looking forward to going to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Day-tripping.
16. WHAT’S THE IDEAL TITLE FOR TENTH PLANET AND YOUR MUSIC?
    I’ve always liked “unapologetically grandiose.”
17. THANK YOU! THESE LINES ARE YOURS. LEAVE YOUR MESSAGE TO THE METALLERS…
    Thank you, Christine! Conformity with a scene is a fascist act. Listen to everything at least once. Find your own voice. If anyone tries to stop you from doing so stomp them.
Christine  Parastatidou
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