Forming The Void: Speakers of Unspoken Languages
“Are we cursed along” howls James Marshall in the opening verse of Trace the Omen, one of the singles found on a new FORMING THE VOID full-length Reverie. The hypnotic undertones building the backbone of the tune are found across the seven-track release out on Ripple Music.
What’s obvious right off the bat with Reverie is that the Louisiana act expanded their sonic palette quite a bit on this recording. “A lot of it starts between me and the lead guitarist Shadi,” Marshall checks in from Lafayette. “We’ll kinda trade riffs and generally speaking we’ll do a track in the box kinda studio-went-demo, show it to the other guys and then bring it to a jam spot, and kinda change it up as we play it live to put everybody’s strengths. Every drummer has got their own kind of feel, the human element. So we’ll go through and make changes, tempos—maybe one part will be cooler than some other parts and maybe we will remove or change the part and do that a bunch of times over several months or a year, and come up with something that we think is a good representation of where we’re at that time.”
Drawing parallels between Reverie and earlier efforts, it becomes clearer that the quartet decided to slow down embracing more organic and warm feel for the new batch of songs. In Marshall’s own words, “It’s almost like every album is just a snapshot in time and it’s kind of a constant evolution that’s happening. Us being just an underground independent band, we are not really tied to any specific thing, so we will kinda just lean into whatever we’re enjoying at the time.”
During the recording phase for Reverie, drummer Thomas Colley joined the band at the time the band were putting down the riffs. This resulted in making changes to the songs to fit Colley’s style. “Thomas has got a really cool, old-school backbeat style, he’s a really powerful drummer so we tried to play to his strengths a lot more than we previously would have, noticing how much the same song can sound different with a different drummer,” James says and goes on by saying that it was an interesting part for the band. “Even playing on a klick track he would be right on the beat and the snare would be just right behind it.”
Reverie is FORMING THE VOID‘s most free-spirit release to date, but according to Marshall it’s rather a combination of what the band did before and the factor of the newness of these songs. “It’s always interesting to hear other people’s perspectives on it. I guess in a lot of ways we try to get some of the psychedelic, atmospheric elements from Relic with some of the feel that we got with Thomas, and combine some of that the Rift and Relic elements together. Because, in the last album we tried to go for more live energy, heavy stuff, and some of the progressive elements were lost through that. So, try to combine basically elements of our previous few albums.”
Lyrically, Reverie is based around the concepts of dreams, omens, prophecies, and visions. There are songs on the album that tend to be more negative, but are equalized with others that are different, purposeful and positive. For many songwriters the most liberating thing about launching an album is the feeling of completeness. Marshall agrees with that by saying, “I guess it’s kinda cool to be done with it, because I’m sure you probably hear people say at a certain point you just have to let it go and be done with it, move to the next thing. It’s kinda cool in that way, and I tend to really hate things when it’s just finished and I’ll come back a little bit later, and be able to appreciate a little bit more.”
FORMING THE VOID’s perspective on the possibilities of song arrangements has expanded quite a bit since the group’s formation in 2013 and the release of the self-titled debut EP next year. “We’ve gotten to noticing that songs that are just focused more on the vibe or a certain feel in a room tend to connect with people better than when we personally try to cram a bunch of different parts in a song. On some of our earlier albums – I think Skyward more than any other album – we would just try to put as many parts in a song as we could, and I like it for just writing and recording, but when you take it to the live performance I don’t think it does as well for us, so we’ve gotten to doing less parts and just trying to focus on getting two or three parts that work really well together, and hopefully trying to focus on getting a good energy in a room.”
A lot of FORMING THE VOID music has a very complex arrangements. Does pervading tracks with that amount of ornamentation come naturally to you?
James: Yes, absolutely. We tend to try to think, for instance – Shadi’s lead guitar playing – he won’t use that many notes but he’ll phrase them in a way that’s got a lot of detail and less is more, that’s the way we look at it.
Do you tend to follow-up any pre-defined patterns when composing a piece or does everything come out of improvisation and jamming together?
James: It’s a little of both. We have a style of riff that we’ll maybe come back and try again. And it’s almost like when you have standards and blues, we kind of have those sorts of pieces, and then when we jam we’ll get that layer of improvisation and just throw the rules out of the door and try to modify things, if that makes sense.
Reverie is your fifth studio album. How do you feel you’ve evolved as a musician and songwriter, and also as a band collectively, across those recordings?
James: In a way, I’d say we’ve gotten a better idea of how listeners perceive it. Playing more gigs, more live shows it’s helped a lot when you see how people take it in, and that gives you a different perspective on how you want to write the next batch. Noticing that less is more in a lot of different ways for the style that we do, trying to combine energy but then also some progressive intricacy that just makes it slightly challenging but not masturbatory. I like to listen to some crazy progressive stuff, but personally, for our band I don’t think that will be what we lean to.
With the virus madness going on, have there been any second thoughts about launching this album, especially knowing that you will not be able to promote it live right after it’s released?
James: I really wish we could have but obviously we didn’t see it coming. Everything was set in motion. It’s a bummer that we are not going to be able to do a tour right behind this album and promote it like we hoped, but it’s gonna give us some time to take a step away from the band which has been creatively good. There is so much time you have to spend practicing and prepping, recording. It’s a good thing, I think.
Are there any certain plans for the further promotion of the album bearing in mind the coronavirus outbreak?
James: The timing of all this also came in line with our drummer breaking his arm in a pretty band work accident. It did overlap in a nice way but we are hoping to do some kind of a live stream once he’s able to play again. He played for the first time since the accident today and is still dealing with some pain from that, but yeah I’m hopeful that we will be able to do some kind of livestream and go through some of the new songs. Originally we weren’t planning on doing any kind of video promotion for this album. We are gonna change the course on that and try to get a video done, so that we can have some promotion in a couple of months.
Speaking of promotion, FORMING THE VOID is surrounded by a great team of labels, PR, and booking agencies. From the perspective of an established act, how important it is for you to have this team surrounding the band, and how does it make your ‘job’ easier?
James: It saves so much time. For Skyward I was sending all the emails myself and I think anybody who is familiar with how that all works knows that so much is based on relationships and connections and all that. A buddy of mine had actually given me some advice on just like “send a hundred emails and maybe you’ll get two responses.” And that’s what I did. But by the time we did Relic we had some PR and a label, and it just saves so much time where you can just play music.
Back to FORMING THE VOID and the new album. With the direction of the new songs and the new decade, which by the way didn’t really start as we hoped for, do you kind of see Reverie as a new beginning of sorts?
James: I don’t know if it’s a new beginning just since fundamentally we were trying to blend a couple of the elements that we like from the previous albums into one, I guess, more cohesive album. We’re kind of hoping for the next batch of songs to try to experiment a little bit more and push the envelope. I think this album for us in a lot of ways is just trying to tackle some of the elements that we liked better. Vocally I kind of switched some things up trying to sing in a way that I can pull off live consistently. A lot of the yelling that I was doing on some of the previous albums, my voice would get just totally fucking blown out by the end of the show. So kinda switching up trying to work on technique a little bit more.
Reverie is out now via Ripple Music.
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