Philadelphia's DYSRHYTHMIA have been around longer than much of the current wave of instrumental Metal bands, yet they have yet to garner the press and accolades that contemporaries such as PELICAN and THE FUCKING CHAMPS have managed to enjoy. A sad state of affairs indeed as DYSRHYTHMIA are very worthy of such attention and praise. With the release of their third album for Relapse Records, "Psychic Maps", DYSRHYTHMIA are poised to expand their fanbase and increase their visibility in the Metal world.

Tell us a little bit about the new album, "Psychic Maps".

"It's my favorite one so far. It's also the first one we've recorded ourselves in our own studio. Colin, our bassist, is a recording engineer and so he basically engineered the whole album and we mixed it together and it was great 'cause we had more time than ever to really… we still did the tracking pretty quickly but we spent a lot more time on the mix to make sure everything was heard. And there's also more layers of sound to this record than ever before, there's a lot more guitar overdubs, textures and things like that mixed in, so to me, it's more fun to listen to also with headphones 'cause there's sort of more to hear, whereas our older recordings were for the most part pretty stripped down - that's just what we were looking for back then, but we wanted to do something that was more exciting to listen to at home, you know."

One of the things that I've always appreciated about your records is the fact that the bass is actually stands out rather than being drowned out in the rest of the mix.

"Yeah. I mean, I always love Metal bands or whatever with prominent bass guitar 'cause it's an important instrument and our band especially. I mean, in our band, everything is equal, especially just being a trio of guitar, bass and drums. It's really like an equal band - nobody's playing on top of anyone else, no one's soloing over anyone else; everything's working together and that's the way we all like it to be."

What was the song writing process like for this album?

"It took a long time, like one of the songs we started back in 2005 for instance, so it was written over a three to four year period really. Some of that's because we're sort of critical of the music and it takes awhile for us to get something finished. Also, we like to play the songs live a lot before we record them 'cause sometimes things happen live that are interesting that won't happen in the rehearsal room and when they happen, we're like 'that's cool, we should remember that, let's do that again'. So we like to work at our own pace, we don't feel pressured to put out an album every year. Plus we do eight million other things outside this band too, so there's only so much time in the day. All the different things we do are important to us so we don't want to rush any of those. So it takes awhile; we've got to segregate our time more now."

So kind of like the Zappa approach with a lot of play before the actual recording.

"Yeah. 'Cause we're pretty prepared by the time we go into the studio. We're definitely not one of those bands that writes things in the studio. I mean, sometimes there's cool little ideas that happen in the studio at the last minute, little… I don't know, but they're really subtle things, you know. The songs themselves are really structured and written and pretty well rehearsed before we go into the studio, so we work quickly when we get into the studio. There's not fucking around or whatever, you know."

Is there anything you've played live and haven't recorded or recorded live that you don't plan on doing in studio?

"Yeah, actually, but not so much lately. Back before we recorded 'Pretest' we had a couple of songs that we… at least two songs that we were playing live, one of them I think we only played twice and the other one we were playing for a couple months, so many times, that we just abandoned and I don't remember how to play them. I probably have some live recordings of them at home somewhere. I don't think anyone's missing anything, though. They were songs that had cool ideas and cool parts but they weren't strong enough to make it to a record. They could have probably been reworked into something usable but at this point I don't want to dig up old riffs from eight years ago or whatever, you know. Better to move on to new stuff."

Save it for the anthology. (laughter)

"Yeah, if someday people are that nerdy about our band, maybe we'll put it out… that they really want to hear everything. Oh, there is this song that we recorded, like an eleven minute song. We put out a CD called 'Contradiction' which not a lot of people know about, it was something we self-released when we first got together and we only made five hundred and that was it and we don't really like that record, so we don't care if anyone hears it. But there was a song that we recorded during that session, this eleven minute kind of Doom instrumental that never made it to the record and no one's ever heard that. That's kind of something that's just sitting around."

Okay, back to the new album, what would you say are your favorite tracks off of it?

"I like them all pretty equally 'cause I feel like everything has a pretty good flow. I guess if I had to pick one song, the last song on the record called 'Lifted By Skin' - it's kind of the long epic song, that's probably my favorite one 'cause it really goes all over the place. Pretty dynamic. That's an intense song live, too. It's probably my least favorite to play live 'cause it's hard but on record it's my favorite one to listen to."

What is your opinion on the growing number of instrumental bands out there? It hasn't become a trend yet, thank God, but it's becoming more prevalent.

"Definitely."

What do you think about that?

"I think it's cool 'cause that means when we go on tour now, like we are right now where we're playing our own headlining shows, pretty much every night we're playing with different local bands in whatever town we're in and God, there's been so many instrumental bands every night that we've been playing with and most of them are pretty good, you know. It's better than suffering through terrible Nu Metal bands like we used to or just bad break down bands or whatever. So I think it's cool. Some of them don't need to be instrumental; I listen to some of these bands and they're all great players but there really is something missing, like they really probably should have a vocalist and then there are other bands that sounds like it should be instrumental. But either way I think it's cool that it's growing."

If you ever go down to Eugene or Corvallis area here in Oregon on future tours, you should try to play a show with A((WAKE)) - they're a really awesome instrumental band.

"Okay. Haven't heard of them. We've never played Eugene, yet. We played Roseburg last year."

How was that? (laughs)

"Not that great. (laughter) It's pretty much just the few Portland people that came to that show and then came to this one, as well and that was it. I don't think there was any Roseburg crowd for us, really."

Yeah, there's not really much of a scene down there. Alright, tell us a little bit about your acoustic solo record.

"That was something I'd been working on really slowly. I put out an acoustic solo thing in 1997 and it was just a three song cassette and I always had this intention to… you know, I didn't think it would be until twelve years later that I'd put out another one of those things. But I kind of lost inspiration for awhile with that stuff and then suddenly it just came back to me really quickly a couple years ago, like started writing a bunch of acoustic music and just got into the studio really fast and recorded it all and put out that record myself. I have some new stuff too that I'm working on. It's pretty different from the DYSRHYTHMIA stuff, you know - not only because it's acoustic but it's also a bit more tonal and it's more classically influenced and there's some experimental stuff on there, too. I feel like it's the most listenable thing I've ever done, you know. I feel like it could have a wide audience if people really heard it or knew about it."

Are you going to be doing any promotional touring on that?

"I do some live shows, but probably not much touring. I did do a mini-tour last year with my drummer's other band, ZEVIOUS, it's like a Jazz trio. We did sort of an East Coast week and a half long thing, which is pretty rough. It's hard enough getting people to come out and see DYSRHYTHMIA never mind our solo projects. (laughter)"

Since you also play for them, what's going on with GORGUTS? The Metal Archives page says the band is active but the MySpace page hasn't been logged into since April.

"I don't think Luke… I don't think he's set up a GORGUTS MySpace yet or anything yet. But no, the band is definitely active - we demoed three songs back in April and we're going to get together again next month in November and probably demo more songs. I'd say we have half an album written and it's coming along great. Luke is pretty much writing all the songs first on guitar, so basically he's writing the songs but then he sends us the song with just the guitar and a click track and he lets us write our own parts to it and then we get together once we have our parts written, we get together and rehearse it and it's been working really well that way. Kind of fun for me to just kind of add my own flavor to his already well-structured, awesome song. It's going to be cool, it's going to be different than what people are expecting, doesn't sound like 'Obscura' part two. It still sounds like GORGUTS but it's something new for the band."

Is there anything you would like to do that you haven't tried yet a band, whether it be DYSRHYTHMIA or your own solo material or something else?

"Hmmm… well, I mean, that's the reason we keep going - every time we feel there's something new we can do or something we could do better or expand upon. With my solo stuff I kind of dabbled a bit on the CD I already put out with something called prepared guitar, which is where you put objects in the strings and suddenly it changes the pitches and it sounds percussive and stuff. I think that's a really interesting technique and other guitar players have done that before and stuff but it's a whole world that can be further explored in my opinion. And I think it would be cool to try some of that stuff in a Rock approach too with DYSRHYTHMIA; really create some interesting textures in instrumental Rock, like writing riffs with a nail file stuck in my strings. That could create some interesting things… as well as being a well-structured piece of music, not just wanky noise. So the possibilities are always endless."

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

"I hope people check out the new record and come see us live. Stay tuned to all our future activities." [FIN]