Calligram: Embracing Chaos
“The album is about chaos at the end of the day.” It’s easy enough to take CALLIGRAM vocalist Matteo Rizzardo at his word there. The record he’s talking about, Position | Momentum, is certainly chaotic – an album which majors first and foremost on the abrasive violence fans have come to expect from the London-based black metallers. Where things get a little more complex however is when Rizzardo and his bandmates emphasise that this record is a celebration, a work of joy even in the face of the themes of death, pain and anxiety that run through its eight tracks.
“There’s many ways to express chaos and darkness and all that comes with that, and we do it in our own way,” elaborates Rizzardo. “I can only scream so that’s the only means I have to express it, but it’s important to separate what you say from how you say it. Even though we talk about chaos and darkness, we don’t do it in a negative way as we did in the previous album; it’s like a celebration. We wanted to create an album that was all about the chaos of life, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, because you can see life in a bad way and think that nothing makes sense, everything is shit, everything is so depressing. But at the same time you can say ‘everything is depressing, nothing makes sense, but I can make something out of it’.”
It’s this mindset which has yielded CALLIGRAM’s most ambitious effort yet. Having refused to write until they could all be in the same room together – their previous full-length The Eye Is The First Circle came out just weeks into the first lockdown here in the UK – the band have stretched their sound out further than ever, tempering their vicious concoction of black metal and D-beat hardcore with more passages of moody quiet and even melody that only sharpen their most vicious edges.
“As much as we like black metal, sometimes listening to an entire record of it we personally feel that it could have more in it,” offers drummer Ardo Cotones on how the band’s sound came together. “That’s what we do; whenever we feel like the blast beats and that whole wall of noise is becoming a bit too linear, then the natural thing for us is always go to the D-beats and bring the punk into it, and post-metal stuff to bring more atmosphere, so then you have a few different layers rather than just having a really long wall of sound.”
But if that makes it all sound meticulously planned, you’re forgetting one key thing: it’s all about chaos, remember? “We wanted to write something dark and heavy and nasty, but then life takes its own direction and you get carried away with that,” muses Rizzardo. “I personally feel we don’t really have control of what we write; once you decide to try to go into this direction, everything sort of happens naturally. Also, it’s interesting that when you put five different people together, what you get is not the sum of those people, you get something more, and that is something that amazes me, that the band is always more than the people that are creating.”
“We just kept the door open basically,” continues Cotones. “Like, bring whatever you want to bring and let’s see where it goes. I think those more atmospheric bits and pacing and balancing those changes was something that gradually was happening throughout stuff that we released before. The band started with just pure intensity all the time and then we basically honed our songwriting skills by listening to our own stuff and going ‘this track could have used a bit more of this or a bit more of that’. It’s not that we’re not proud of it, but just using it as a reference to evolve.”
Of course, it helps no end that CALLIGRAM is held together by close knit relationships. Plenty of bands describe their bandmates as brothers, but Cotones is keen to emphasise that he really means it. “The communication within this band has become very important to us,” he explains. “We aren’t just a band, we’ve been through many things as mates. Whenever someone is down for whatever reason, we are always there for each other, for real. We don’t take this for granted and I think that’s why this band is alive and well and evolving.”
“None of us want to deliver something that not everyone is completely happy with,” adds Rizzardo. “We reason as a band, we think as a band, so it’s important that whatever comes out as CALLIGRAM is fully backed up by all of us, and that’s one of the reasons why we hardly argue about this sort of stuff. Everything that comes out under the name of CALLIGRAM is completely backed up by all of us because it agrees with all of our tastes and visions and everything.”
And so, as we come to conclude, the band’s hopes for what listeners will take away from Position | Momentum are largely as expected: “Same thing that they take away when we play in front of them: confusion,” smiles Rizzardo. “We want people to have a reaction. Even if they hate it, we want people to be moved by it, because it’s about chaos at the end of the day…”
Position | Momentum is out now via Prosthetic Records.
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