Graver Motion
Interview: Kuronen
The 53 seconds of air raid siren wailing at
the beginning of Antimatter’s Lights Out (The End Records MMIII) serve
as a converse magnification of the broad-spectrum implications exhibited by the
record. In some ways, those 53 seconds are the maximisation of Lights Out,
all the sky and uphill the listener will see for the course of its duration.
Everything that comes after is slighter, fairer and subtler, which is about the
best result the party of understatement could ever hope to negotiate. Lights
Out says a lot even though it hardly moves its lips.
Antimatter, as most of you will know by
now, is a duo comprising of Mick Moss and Duncan Patterson. Lights Out
is their ‘sophomore’ release. The most educated of you may have heard the
band’s debut album, Saviour, which was released by The End Records in
2002. Lights Out is not a mindless replica of the first record. Whereas Saviour
was packaged in white, had some sort of angel figure on the cover and was
musically melancholic at the most, the darkly laid out Lights Out takes
a plunge into the realms of dimmer material and graver motion. With acoustic
guitars, keyboards, male and female voices, and a weighty sense of ambience,
Antimatter have composed lengthy, trance-like tracks that step the fine line
between spacious and minimalist.
Lights Out
is a curious evolution from the structured music of Saviour. Explaining
the progress from the first album to the second, Mick Moss goes all the way
back to his genesis as a songwriter.
“My earliest music was always experimental,
progressive and instrumental, but when I began to sing I began writing ‘songs’
and I focused purely on vocal, lyric and melody. The songs I put forward for Saviour
were from a time when I was still writing songs and completely ignoring the
concept of instrumental passages, and I realised this when it came to writing
for Lights Out. So when the time came for the next batch of songs, I
fleshed them out and added dynamics and generally breathed life into the frame
of things, which is something I never did for Saviour.
“The writing process for Lights Out
included looking back at Saviour and asking myself what I could’ve done
better. This is a process I never went through in doing Saviour because
it was my first album. There is an urge to mature my compositions in now, but
this is something I couldn’t do on the first album because it was my first
experience with recording. On Saviour my ambition was purely to get a
good recording of my best songs, but on Lights Out my ambition was to
improve on Saviour.”
Antimatter’s music has a very earthy,
unpretentious feel to it. It seems to reflect quite unequivocally the
personalities behind it. Striving for honesty and sincerity, the compositions
do not allow the presence of any surplus components that could not establish a
connection to the core of the art. The music claims rights only to the
essential and indispensable. The temperament lies not only in the spirit and
integrity, but in the overpowering wholeness.
Mick reflects, “Duncan always says that in
a lot of full bands, you get guys who just stick to one thing i.e. a guitarist
or a bassist, so they focus on their instrument as a factor that’s more
important than the overall picture—because all they manage to see is their
instrument or their ‘part’. So you’ll get a lead guitarist who doesn’t know
when to stop and this detracts from the maturity of the composition. We simply
write pieces of music and we see this as our job. Whereas some arseholes may
pat someone on the back for being able to play the drums really fast, we
acknowledge each other for writing a good song or doing a good turn in a
composition. So for this reason our stuff doesn’t come out pretentious, and
everything that’s in there is there for a reason—not because some guy’s
standing there afraid not to play for five minutes so he adds a part so as not
to look stupid on stage. Also, we don’t feel the need to poodle to a specific
style, so overall our music isn’t being compromised by egos or forced
stylisations.”
Rather wondrously, Mick and Duncan mould
Antimatter’s music largely as two separate units.
“We write our own songs in our own time and
we play most of the instruments on our own tracks so we don’t really work
together. Our albums are like two solo EP’s sewn together and it works really
well because our styles go together. In the studio, I’ll do a little on his
tracks and he’ll do a little on mine but this is merely a smudging together of
the dividing lines.”
Perhaps it is this that brings dynamism
into Antimatter’s music. Mick believes one only has to listen to the first
three songs on Lights Out to see the bumps and drops in there.
Nonetheless, he says he has heard it said before that Lights Out has got
no dynamics.
“What do these people mean by dynamics? Do
they even know the meaning of the word? I spent months getting the peaks and
dips just right, and then some pseudo-intellectual shit head writes that
there’s no dynamics in the album, and in the same breath that same shit head
will review a really crap metal album with absolutely no dynamics and say it’s
the best thing he’s heard for ages.”
Dynamic or not, Lights Out delivers
one healthy notion: when it becomes difficult to move, stop moving.
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