By Andrew Bansal
Los Angeles based technical death metal band Fractalline formed in 2010 and after an initial surge, the band went through a three-year period of lineup consolidation but are now back with a new album called ‘Polymath Theory’ and are playing shows in the LA area again. They’re set to take the stage at Loaded Hollywood next Wednesday September 3rd with Behold! The Monolith, Vampire Squid and others. A few days ago on August 23rd, I sat down with vocalist Jordan Nalley, guitarist KP Krishnamoorthy and bassist Vimal Ramesh for a detailed interview. Check out the conversation below along with some of their new music.
Firstly, it’s been three years since I last saw you guys play a show, after which you took a break and haven’t done much. What’s been going on with the band?
KP: Well, the time we took a break from things, we pretty much worked on getting the album done, mixed, mastered, recorded and everything, and that got finished and put out. So that was one of the main things. And also, we lost both our drummer and bassist when we stopped playing three years ago, so we had to spend some time finding the right kind of people who would fit in, because with us fitting with a person is the biggest part of having him in the band, as compared to just the musical abilities of that person. So it wasn’t that easy to find the right people.
Jordan: Yeah, in the time off we had a lot of stuff to figure out because of people being out of the country because the old lineup was all students on student visas. Everybody kind of had their own priorities when they came out here, I think. So, we had to respect that and move on as a band, and finish the album whatever it took so that we could get the album that we wanted. That’s what we’ve been doing the last two years or so. When the album started getting near completion we started looking for new members so that when it was released we could start playing shows again and have a tight set.
KP: Jordan and I were polishing the album, making sure the recording was done right and finding the right person to mix and master it which was something really important to us. We found Dave Otero from Colorado, and he’s done exactly what we had in mind.
Jordan: When we heard ‘Monolith Of Inhumanity’, the new Cattle Decapitation record which Dave Otero worked on, and just the amount of stuff going on in the album and the fact that you can hear everything was amazing. For our new album, we had some pretty ridiculous ideas for some of the songs that we knew wouldn’t translate too well unless the production was done to taste, specially because we wanted to do drums organically on the album. But losing the drummer in the recording process forced us to just make do. We thought about trying to find somebody or hiring a session guy or something, but we thought we’d just go all out like that on the record when we have a drummer, because we want our drummer to play drums on our album. So we programmed it this time but hopefully we won’t have to do it again (laughs).
So, obviously this material will sound better live with a real drummer then.
Jordan: Yeah, that’s been the goal ever since getting the new members. We’re trying to bring on the same sound that we got on the album that we really liked and we’d like to be able to bring it onto the stage.
KP: And also, we’ve been doing our best to document ourselves to see how well we can pull off the songs. We’ve been recording a couple of playthrough videos with drums involved and taking videos of live performances as well to put them up on youtube, because a lot of bands these days are probably putting in a lot of interesting things in the studio but it’s really hard to translate them live. The internet has created that kind of thing these days where you can get some really interesting music in a studio but translating it life is really difficult. We’d never want to be unable to do that.
Vimal, how did you come into this band?
Vimal: It’s .. quite a story, actually! Basically, I was in college in India and I was organizing a show in the town where the college was, and these guys were on tour at the same time, around April 2011. Their tour manager hit me up and asked me if I could get them on the show. So I did that, met these guys, found out about Musicians Institute and talked to them about it. I then ended up coming here to study guitar.
KP: MI basically sponsored our India tour, but they probably made back more than that amount just because of this one guy coming here! (laughs)
Vimal: And not to mention the several others that followed. But yeah, I ended up coming here and rooming with Jordan. And then the two of us moved in with KP.
Jordan: And right when we found our drummer and started looking for a bass player, one fine day we thought of asking Vimal. Because he’s a guitar player it didn’t even come to my mind rightaway.
KP: The thing is, I’ve always played in bands where the bassist is a guitar player in real life. I think it works really well though, because guitar players think a certain way and bass players think a certain way. This band having just one guitarist it’s useful having a bass player who takes more of a front seat in the song. The guitar player naturally tends to think that way. If a bass player is doing his job right he’s probably not at the forefront of the sound, and that may not work as well for us.
So, your mentality is almost like a two-guitar band.
Vimal: It’s eight-string guitar and five-string bass, so yeah it’s kind of on the border of being a two-guitar band as the distorted bass sound eats into guitar territory. In our live set I think we’re having as many bass solos as guitar solos.
KP: It helps because I pretty much hate playing guitar solos and I’m pretty bad at it, and he’s good at it, so he can do that on the bass.
I think you’re the only band ever to have the bassist play more solos than the guitarist.
Vimal: (Laughs) And the only band that would be happy with that arrangement.
So, talking of this new album, musically how different is it from the older Fractalline sound?
Jordan: Well, the album itself kind of evolves because we wrote it over a three-year span. We had two different bass players writing on it. Even our lives changed drastically during that time and we grew closer as well. I think both of our original influences kind of rubbed off on each other and as the album grows, the songs go in a different direction. At the beginning of the album it’s a lot of the stuff that we wrote when we were the original lineup touring and stuff like that. When we went on tour to India in 2011 we played half of this album, so we had already written all that. We had really good momentum initially, but then losing members set us back a bit and we all had to do other stuff. But we kept writing whenever we could find the time, energy and money to put forth towards working on the album. The second half of the album was written over two-and-a-half years, so it grows and on the last couple of songs you can hear more of the direction we’re going in continuing with the band.
All of you have studied at MI. I was wanting to ask you how that relates to being in a metal band. Do you think MI encourages more of the individual musician as compared to a band member?
KP: Well, MI is probably one of the few schools that allow you to learn music seriously while keeping your individuality in place and sticking to whatever genre of music you want to pursue personally. There is not much forced down your throat, there is not much that you can’t learn from the teachers there, and the people teaching metal is legit metal. You don’t just end up playing Iron Maiden songs all the time. And even when you do that, you are learning useful things. You’ll be learning arpeggios, proper soloing and stuff like that, not just learning how to tremolo pick and be brutal. So, that I think is really cool as far as MI goes.
Jordan: MI has been a different experience for me because I just went there for the audio engineering school where I ended up doing five programs, and now I work there. So it’s just been my whole entrance to LA and an easy way to meeting other like-minded musicians and things like that. Even our drummer, we met him through MI because when I started working there his girlfriend started the same day as me, and she was just coming from Sumerian Records to work there. We started talking about metal, I showed her Fractalline and she introduced me to her boyfriend. Everybody in school kept pointing me in his direction as far as a solid metal drummer, so I talked to him and he learned two of our songs in a week or two. Before Vimal joined, the three of us jammed together for two or three weeks, and then the full lineup jammed for another 4-6 weeks before we started playing shows. We’ve played four shows now, we have two more booked, and it’s going forward from here!
You can be labeled as a technical death metal band, and in that genre there are so many bands playing nowadays, it’s hard to even keep track. Do you see it as a challenge to do something to stand out from the others?
KP: Well, the way I approach the band, it allows me to express exactly the kind of music I always wanted to write, and it is never going to be my source of income. So it gives me the freedom to just play what seems to naturally come from me when I write music, and I’m not really thinking about standing out from other bands or anything of that sort. The main idea behind writing music for me is to communicate with the audience, write meaningful lyrics that someone can identify with and benefit from, and push people to think about things in ways they may not have thought of before through the lyrics. A lot of the music is based on the lyrics and I’d say that the lyrics are an integral component of what we do. So, all that is what drives me in this band. It’s not really about comparing ourselves with other bands and stuff, because there are obviously many bands doing exactly the kind of stuff we do, better than us and worse than us, and that’s always going to be there.
Jordan: Yeah, this band has always been us writing music that we want to write. I think it’s going to stay that way. I feel that songwriting is a skill set, and when you combine a bunch of members to start writing together, over time that skill set grows as a group and I think that’s why bands that have the same lineup for so long tend to put out phenomenal records, specially when they have that in mind, to create the best music instead of making the most money, for example bands like Gojira where it’s just been those four guys from the beginning, and Mastodon, Meshuggah, Lamb Of God. It’s more about that mentality of creating something and people that believe in what’s being created joining in on it. So it’s a way of just bringing in the people that really matter and understand where you’re coming from. We’ll continue doing that.
And finally, I’ve noticed that you guys have started playing shows again, so how’s that going and what’s your aim with it?
Jordan: Over the last several years I’ve been involved with other bands and I’ve been active in the community whether it’s going to shows, hanging out or meeting with other musicians, and there was a lot of talk along the lines of “Hey, when Fractalline gets up and going again we should play shows together” and things like that. It was just small talk for years because we weren’t up and going and we were working on stuff. But when we finally got the band back together, played a few shows and people that were interested came out and saw it, they wanted to work with us. So basically with all the bands and friends that we’ve been speaking to, we’ve been putting together some events. That’s what we’re doing and we’re not interested in pay-to-play, any big shows on the Strip or anything like that. It’s more about just creating a community and bringing out the people that care to actually listen to the music instead of figuring out how to sell a bunch of tickets. I’m doing a lot of the booking and promotion stuff myself right now, because I’ve worked with promoters in the scene that had good intentions and do a lot for the scene, booking a lot of shows, but a lot of them get caught up in the fact that it’s what they have to do for a living and they’ve got to figure out a way to make money doing it. But I have income, and this is what I do for fun, so I’m just reaching out to friends’ bands to play shows together. It turns out to be fun every time. So as long as we’re having fun playing shows we’ll keep doing it, and if we can book a tour at some point, we’ll try to do that too.
KP: The tour is something I’m definitely interested in looking at as well, because after moving to the States I’ve found that touring and riding my motorcycle into tiny places everywhere, those are the only ways in which you can actually connect to the real people in a country and explore it. The last time we did a West Coast tour it was pretty awesome, we played a whole bunch of tiny shows and it was pretty cool because for example we had this tiny little gig in a place called Medford in Oregon which ended up being double-booked but because of that it ended up being quite awesome as we had to play in this guy’s garage.
Jordan: No, first we went to this Irish pub. They were going to have us set up outside but they didn’t have power, so we had to find some sort of power source and then we had to find cables long enough to reach to that source, just so that we could play. And then the cops got called after the first band played for a noise complaint, so they came and told us that we couldn’t play anymore. But then one of the guys really wanted to see us play and he invited us to his place to set us up in his garage with an electronic drumkit (laughs). So we went there and played, there was a pit, there were stoned guys just hanging out around a bong, taking videos and headbanging. That was also the most merch we ever sold at a show in the States. People were just giving us money.
KP: It was awesome, and experiences like that cannot happen if you just focus on money and try and sell tickets and do things like that. So that’s primarily what I look for in shows, and income can be generated from other sources.
Fractalline links: facebook | twitter | bandcamp
Check out the event page for Fractalline’s next show at Loaded Hollywood on Wednesday 9/3 here.