ISIS

A conversation with Aaron Harris

(November 2006)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Photograph by Robin Laananen

Very good bands can be entirely comfortable working and living within their genre, but most great bands are driven to push boundaries and blur lines.  Having already made two albums (Oceanic and Panopticon) that are considered masterpieces by different factions of their fanbase, ISIS now present In the Absence of Truth.  It’s both an ambitious bruiser and an ambient epic, and affirms their position as a torchbearer in the world of metal…or post-rock or progressive metal.  Whatever you want to call it, turn it up loud and be sure to practice up before you try to play along.

There are echoes of Tool in some of the riffs on In the Absence of Truth, and the two bands recently spent time together on the road.  Despite a reputation for cold shoulders for opening bands among the Tool fanbase (more on that in a bit), ISIS were extremely well received.  Back home and resting up before ISIS embark on a globetrotting headlining tour in 2007, drummer Aaron Harris talked to The Red Alert about the process behind the new record, the thrill of their recent tour, and his own breakthrough in the studio.

First of all, how did your record release party go?

Oh, it was good, it was cool.  We’ve never really done anything like that.  At first, I think people didn’t know how to approach it, but overall it went really well, once things got moving and people got drinking (laughs).

That always helps.  You guys didn’t play, right?

We didn’t play.  We spun the record and hung out and talked to people.  We tried to have kind of a family vibe.

I’ve actually never been to that bar before [Cha Cha Lounge].  Foosball and cheap beer…it sounds right up my alley.

Oh, dude, you should definitely go.  It’s a fucking great bar.  Everyone that works there is really cool, and it’s got a great vibe.

How’s the tour coming together?  Do you know when you’re headed back out on the road?

Yeah, we’re going out at the end of January to Japan and Australia.  At the end of February, we’ll hit the U.S.  It’s kind of weird to not be touring right when the record comes out; we’ve always hit the road like a week before the record comes out.  Doing the Tool tour kind of threw our schedule off a little bit.  I mean, it was obviously well worth it, but it makes me a little nervous to have a record out and not be touring.  I know there’s a lot of hype right now, so I just hope it carries through until the spring.

So you’re just hanging out in the meantime?

Yeah.  Aaron Turner just went over to the U.K. to do some press because the press over there got screwed up—long story.  I think everybody is taking advantage of the time off, knowing that next year is going to be a lot of touring.

And that will be all headlining tours?

Yeah, as far as I know, unless we get offered something good.

Any idea about who you might take out with you?

We’re talking about taking out Jesu for the U.S. leg, but that’s not confirmed yet.

How about new material?  Is there stuff left over from this recording session?

We always try to mix up the songs a little bit live.  These are so new and haven’t been played, so they’ll probably be pretty true to the record, but we always try to throw in some new segueways that we’ve written.  We do a lot of writing on tour, just from jamming at sound checks or whatever.

The new songs weren’t coming up that often during the Tool tour?

We figured that a lot of the crowd would potentially be new fans.  We only had time to do about four songs, so we did one old song and three new ones each set.

I wanted to talk about that tour a little bit.  Tool fans obviously have the reputation of being really hard sells for opening bands, but almost every band I’ve talked to that has opened for them has been greeted with open arms—which was the case for ISIS.  Do you think their reputation is misplaced?

I think it’s totally misplaced.  I think Tool has such a wide variety of fans.  I wonder if Tool, for some reason, gets lumped in with a genre by people who don’t know the band.  I think their fans earlier on were a little harder in terms of what they were looking for, but Tool has evolved so much and made people—without even knowing it—open their musical spectrums.  Tool has broadened so much since their first record, since Undertow, even.  I think their fans are highly intelligent and really awesome.  They have a great following.

I saw them at Coachella this last year and there was a lot of chatter about “Oh, the Tool fans will be there.  Oh, they’ll hate everything else and they’ll beat up the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah fans,” or whatever.  But of course—in general—that wasn’t the case at all.

Yeah, I mean, they’re really passionate.  People may think that’s intimidating—and sometimes it can be for some bands.  They’re passionate but not violent or aggressive.

Yeah, I think the band makes it pretty clear that they frown on that sort of thing, like the macho bullshit in the pit.

Totally.  And you get meatheads in any genre, but, for the most part, their fans are really great.  I just read the other day that that tour was one of the best in history—and I was there, and I can tell you that it was amazing.  20,000 people would come out to see Tool!  It was phenomenal.  It’s almost like you don’t get it.  It’s exciting because, man, people like good music.  It’s not about all the things the music industry says it is.

Fans—especially online—are pretty vigilant about going after bands they perceive as selling out.  In touring with Tool, did you see that, oh, we’d have to make certain concessions to be at that level—or can you headline those shows and still do things on your own terms?

Honestly, I think Tool is setting a great example for musicians and for fans of music.  They go against every single rule, they go against all the odds.  They have eight-minute videos, they have barely any press.  They do all the wrong things, and are still a huge, huge band that plays really good music and is appreciated by a lot of different people.  I think it’s inspiring, especially for a band like us, doing the type of music that we do.

Going to the new album, it says in the liner notes that you guys spent about a month recording it here in L.A.  Is that pretty much full-throttle, where you guys are all in there all the time, or are you guys going in and laying down your parts individually?  Is it high-stress or low-stress?

It was pretty easy this time, I’d say.  We’d do twelve-hour shifts, and I think we were all in there at one point or another every single day.  When I was doing my tracks, I wanted everybody there to play along.  In the past, I would only track with Aaron, or Aaron or Jeff, and it’s hard to get a song when you’re tracking with just one person.

Are the songs pretty finished by the time you get them into the studio?

There was one song that we went over and over and couldn’t get finalized.  There’s a joke we’ve been saying ever since:  “We’ll figure it out in the studio.”  That was our approach with that song; we’d written it, and then went back to it six months later and said, “Hey, I’m not feeling this song.”  We decided to rework it about a week before we went into the studio, so we left it at “We’ll figure it out in the studio.”  So that’s become a running joke…if we ever have to make a decision, we’ll say, “Well, we’ll just figure it out in the studio.” (laughs)

How do you know when the album is finished?  Is it a clear, “Presto!” sort of thing, or more like “We have to step away from this or otherwise we’ll stay in here for two years?”

No, totally.  What we do every time is we set a date, because honestly we’ll just keep writing and messing with stuff forever.  So we say “We’ve got some good headway here, let’s set a date and just do it.”

The cohesion of the record is striking.  It’s almost hard to imagine it fitting together any different way.  When do you figure out the sequencing?

It’s the last thing we do, after we track everything and get all the segueways in.  Before we send it off for mastering, we do the sequencing.  Surprisingly, this one and Panopticon were really, really easy, and everyone was on the same page…whereas Oceanic was a little harder.  For us, it’s really important to make sure that it flows—that it has a good beginning, middle and end.

There’s a cinematic feel to the album, maybe because of that arc.  Have you had your stuff used in films?

No.  We’ve always wanted to, but we’ve never been approached.  That’s always been a goal for us—or even to score a film, that would be great.

In the recent feature on ISIS in Decibel magazine, you get singled out as making the biggest leap between records.  I don’t want to push you into bragging about yourself, but did you have it in mind that “Alright, I’m going to do something different this time, I’m going to kick it up a notch?”

I did.  In the past, I had always gone into the studio with an approach and kind of figured out what kind of sound I wanted, and it was always a less-is-more approach with ISIS.  There’s so much going on texturally with guitars and keyboards that I felt that my role was to lay a good groove and foundation underneath.  Not that I wanted to step away from that, but this time I didn’t want to go in with a specific vision.  I wanted to go in and be completely without ego or any kind of perception of how I wanted it to be; I just wanted to play what came from within me.  There were some new things I tried—a couple beats, some sampling stuff—and I wanted to fill up some of the space with electronics.

ISIS already have a couple albums in the bag that get comments from fans like “Well, the new one is good, but…it’s never going to top Oceanic (or Panopticon).”  Does the band hold them in that same regard?  Do they cast any kind of a shadow?

No.  I mean, the albums were specific to where we were at that point.  To be completely truthful, I feel that this one is our best work.  I worked really hard on it—we all worked really hard on it—and it took us a long time to write.  Musically, I think we’re the best we’ve ever been.  That’s how I feel now, but when Oceanic came out, or Panopticon, at that time, I felt that was our best work.  I think it’s really important that we move forward and try to outdo ourselves.  We wouldn’t release a record unless we felt that way about it.  That’s always been the way we’ve felt, from the beginning.  Each new record is where we’re at and what we feel is our best work.  I’m obviously proud of the other records, but I don’t hold any of them as “That was our best work.”

Do you still listen to them, the older records?

Yeah, totally.  Sometimes I’ll hear someone else play it and think, “Man, I haven’t listened to that in so long!”  And sometimes if I’m trying to remember songs, I have to listen to them.  (laughs)  I haven’t listened to the first two EPs in a long time.  That’s so far removed from where we are now that it’s hard to listen to them.

There’s some pretty dense lyrical content/inspiration throughout the albums.  Do you think that fans miss out a little bit if they just come to quote-unquote “rock out?”

We hope that people, for whatever reason, develop a personal relationship with the record.  On Panopticon, we kind of threw out all of the ideas and concepts behind the record, and it kind of became too easy and defeated the purpose of doing it.  Everyone knew exactly what it was about and where the idea came from.  This time, we decided to just give a loose reference and leave it at that.  You don’t want to hand-feed the information to people, and you want to leave space for people to have a relationship with the album, even if you’re not interested in the lyrics or concepts.  And if you are, then leave it kind of mysterious so you can have your own ideas about it.  I think that’s important.  There are a lot of albums that, through different periods of my life, I’ve built certain relationships with, and can reminisce whenever I put them on.  That’s a good feeling, and something we want to accomplish.