As you can tell by the picture above, BEREFT carries some heavyweight members. Featuring Derek Rydquist (ex-The Faceless), Sacha Dunable (Intronaut), Charles Elliott (Abysmal Dawn) and Derek Donley (Graviton), BEREFT will immediately get labeled as a super group. They are mighty and evil doom with tons of different vocal approaches. It’s slow and depressing while still having some progressive moments that pay tribute to the other bands these guys are in.
Metal Army caught up with Sacha Dunable of INTRONAUT while the band was on tour as direct support for ANIMALS AS LEADERS. We chatted with Sacha about life on the road, writing new songs, indispensable gear, his various side projects and other topics.
INTRONAUT spent their summer opening for ANIMALS AS LEADERS.
MAA: How is the tour going so far?
SD: The tour is going great. All the shows have been packed with lots of enthusiastic kids, all the bands are great. So we couldn’t be happier.
MAA: I have seen you several times since Valley of Smoke has came out and every show has its own unique vibe. Is that predetermined or spontaneous?
SD: Yeah, it’s usually predetermined especially on these support tours you’re working with a pretty strict time restriction and so it’s always a pretty well rehearsed set. We do the same thing pretty much every night, but yeah I mean the last couple times we’ve been through here it’s been different so we’ve had different time restrictions so sometimes we’ve been able to, kinda let loose and play more songs. Play some of our more adventurous songs just because were a little more relaxed.
MAA: Valley of Smoke is almost a year old. Looking back on it now did you accomplish everything on it you hoped to ?
SD: Yeah, I think so. I mean at this point we are already starting to write new riffs and stuff. When that happens you get excited about the new stuff and automatically the last record just doesn’t really excite you as much anymore, but I still think it was our best record up until then and definitely a good progression for us. I still love the record I’m really proud of it, but I’m just already kinda getting antsy to work on new stuff.
MAA: Do you have one piece of gear for the road that you can’t live without?
SD: I don’t know. I guess… what I would need? I would need a delay pedal. Other than that, you can just give me any kind of crappy guitar or gear and I can make it work. I wouldn’t be happy about it, but I could make it work.
Sacha's side project GRAVITON saw the release of Massless this spring on Translation Loss Records.
MAA: Would you to talk about the GRAVITON record?
SD: Yeah, it’s just a record that I do with my two friends Derek (Donely) and Darin (Tombascio), who have their own band called NATIONAL SUNDAY LAW, which actually is no more because one of the guys moved away. Yeah, I mean, they’re just old friends and have a home studio, the drummer Derek does and so we would just get together. I mean this is what I do, I just make music when I’m at home and we’re not touring or whatever. We did a lot of it while INTRONAUT was writing and recording Valley of Smoke, just whenever I wasn’t doing that, we would just be in there cranking shit out. It took us a year to finish, but we’re pretty happy with it. I’m not ashamed of it or anything. It was a fun record to make and obviously we were doing it ourselves so there’s things that if I could go back and change a couple of things, I definitely would. It was a super causal thing. The fact that Translation Loss even put it out was kind of unexpected. We weren’t even expecting that, it was supposed be just be a pretty casual thing. But that band is pretty much done now. I mean we might do something, with technology nowadays you can make anything happen with people living all over the country, or the world. I actually have a new project going with Derek from that band on drums along with Charles Elliot from ABYSMAL DAWN, Derek (Rydquist) the now former singer of THE FACELESS doing a total slow doom metal thing. We’re still working on a name for the band, but we finished the record and that should be coming out pretty soon I think too.
INTRONAUT. Not pictured: Dave Timnick, Katy Perry fan.
MAA: What kind of music do you listen to on the road? Anything out of the ordinary?
SD: What have we been listening too? Dave (Timnick) has been doing a lot of the driving on this tour and Dave s to just flip through the radio. That’s what he does for five hours straight. He’ll just flip through the radio, stop on a song and sing along to it. That’s just how he rolls, so there’s been a lot of that. The last actual record I think we listened to was, well, the last record that anybodies ever heard of would probably be, THE FLAMING LIPS covering Dark Side of the Moon, that record. I think Dave got annoyed with it after two songs and put the radio back on. We’ve heard a lot of KATY PERRY on the radio, nationwide.
MAA: Well, at least she’s visually pleasing!
SD: Yeah, visually pleasing. Actually it’s visually pleasing watching Dave sing those songs! (Laughs)
MAA: After this tour wraps up what else does INTRONAUT have on tap for the rest of 2011?
SD: We’re going back to Europe in October and then maybe some more U.S. touring after that. Just the whole waiting to hear about stuff thing. If we don’t do another U.S. tour this year, which I hope doesn’t happen, but if that’s the case we’ll probably start working on some new material, slowly but surely.
(Thanks to Sacha Dunable, Century Media Records and Danny Graf.)
We are just a few short hours from the might INTRONAUT rocking our site LIVE in the first ever ‘Live from the Compound’! The Compound is Metal Army America’s online home for metal shows. Tune in to see INTRONAUT play an hour set live, just for you and take questions from the audience in this epic unveiling of the ONLY internet night club.
To be a part of this monumental occasion, just visit The Compound (http://www.metalarmyamerica.com/thecompound/) and log in via your Facebook account. You will be able to communicate with the band and other fans as well purchase band merch and more. Oh, and did we mention the awesome, free concert from INTRONAUT!?!?
Beginning at 8PM (Pacific) / 11PM (Eastern), this is not the concert to miss – and one that you can enjoy from your own couch.
Stay tuned for more exclusive, FREE concerts here at Metal Army! If you want to perform on ‘Live at the Compound’, please email editor@metalarmyamerica.com.
When I think of the band HELMET I think of two words: heavy and uncompromising. Coming out of the post-hardcore and metal scene in New York in the late 80′s and early 90′s every band at the time was trying to break boundaries and be unique. HELMET along side such luminaries of the time like PRONG, QUICKSAND, CARNIVORE, UNSANE, BURN and a pre-major label WHITE ZOMBIE were all disparate musical acts bound by similar tastes and musical ambitions. As a native New Yorker I was lucky to witness this scene rise first hand and Page Hamilton’s outfit always made me proud when other people would speak highly of them. Promoting their recently released Seeing Eye Dog (Work Song) the band is back with another lineup and a new reinvigorated mindset for these times.
Local up and comer’s RIBS opened the show tonight. They have built a nice following though constant gigging and sharp social media skills and the early turnout was evidence as they had a lot of heads in the room. Less metal and more like an ambient, shoe-gazey rocking version of A PERFECT CIRCLE, they stunned the crowd with their fine performance. They may have put off some fans of the headliners, but they have a lot in common with the mellower parts of INTRONAUT and I liked their guts to stand up there and do their own thing. All of their songs have interesting textural, layered guitar parts that swept and swayed over the crowd. The best song of the set was called “Brains Out”. They have a strong sense of dynamics and humor in their style that I dug a lot. RIBS also put on a very good stage show and I will be watching their career with great interest.
INTRONAUT released one of my top 5 albums of the year yesterday. ‘Valley of Smoke’ is massive, sprawling and one of the most organically original records I have heard in the last ten years. The band also just unveiled the fourth and final installment of ‘In the Valley of Smoke’ with bassist Joe Lester! Check it out and make sure you pick up ‘Valley of Smoke’!
INTRONAUT has become one of the most respected purveyors of Thinking Man’s Metal in the past five years or so thanks to underground releases ‘Null’, ‘Void’, and my personal favorite ‘The Challenger EP’. Then the band began their breakthrough, signing with Century Media Records for the release of 2008’s ‘Prehistoricisms’ – a masterpiece that was heralded by Decibel, Revolver and the blog world.
INTRONAUT then toured with the true titans of this scene, MASTODON, and have also completed treks alongside CYNIC and other respected bands in the progressive metal scene. Frontman Sacha Dunable has become a bit of an online celebrity since beginning his Blogronaut column over at MetalSucks, drummer Danny Walker has begun a household name in the metal community, Joe Lester (bass) and Dave Timnick (guitar) have received gargantuan praise for their performance of ‘Prehisoricisms’ and it has begun to look as if INTRONAUT can do no wrong!
Now comes ‘Valley of Smoke’, INTRONAUT’s second album for Century Media due out October 12 and it’s vastly superior it’s predecessor. Now including clean vocals that will please fans of JESU or CYNIC and what seems to be a more mature writer in Dunable has made for a quite interesting listen. The song “Above” seems to be just that – above everything else that has been done in the last five years with regard to progressive metal.
I have said repeatedly that this is one of the best times in the history of metal. Not only are there a plethora of great new bands charting new musical territories, but many of the older legacy type acts are not only still alive, but also remain creative forces. One such act like this is CYNIC who made their name in the early days of the 1990′s Death Metal scene in Florida. Now they are based in Los Angeles and are striking while the iron is hot with their 2008 comeback album Traced in Air and their recent EP Re-Traced (Season of Mist). Always possessing ninja level chops and favoring a lot of authentic progressive rock flavors, they have been an indispensable influence on many of today’s prog-metal flag-wavers. Even after their break-up and reformation a few years back CYNIC remains one of the most talented, original and professional bands in all of music.
I have seen DYSRTHYMIA several times over the years and they always shine. They play a combination of instrumental metal with a lot of jazz and prog-rock touches. Considering the crowd tonight was largely populated by a lot of Berklee College of Music types, this saw a band playing directly to their key demographic. Unlike your typical instrumentalists DYSRTHYMIA always show off their impressive chops with as little pretense as possible, which I think endears them to fans. If you dig this type of stuff I highly recommend you pickup their latest release Psychic Maps (Relapse Records) which I bought after their set.
INTRONAUT was up next. I liked their last record, Prehistoricisms (Century Media, 2009), but really fell in love with them when I caught their live performance opening up for MASTODON last year. There were definitely many fans in the house on this night who were there to see them as much as the headliner. The band wasted no time after taking the stage kicked things off with “Elegy” a new song from their next album coming out this fall. The track encapsulated everything this band does great: hypnotic beats, crushing guitars, cool vocals and outstanding bass chops. The song also sees the band charting some new ground as they balance their sludgey modern metal with the newer adventurous material they have been mining of late. Reminiscent of an early HELMET song, “Elegy” goes through several interesting shifts thematically. Next was “The Literal Black Cloud” which was equally heavy, trance- like and amazing. As always the middle section of the track features the beautiful chordal bass work by standout player Joe Lester. Next they played two more new songs which vocalist/guitarist Sacha Dunable told me after the show were called “Above” and “Sunderance”. These tracks are just as sprawling and heavy as the rest of the bands’ work. Closing with the epic “Any Port”, they topped off a fine set with the ending drum-jam between ferocious drummer Danny Walker and guitarist/singer/percussionist Dave Timnick. Sacha was gracious with his time chatting with me after the set which I appreciated and I am really looking forward to that new album.
