Right now must be an exciting time to be in International Deathcore band, Slice The Cake. With a new album coming out and playing their first ever live show this summer along side the likes of The Contortionist, Decapitated and Haken the guys are making huge leaps both musically and in popularity.
Pyramid Noise caught up with Vocalist and Lyricist Gareth Mason, for a good ol' chin wag....
So, first things first, what have you been listening to lately?
“Aside from the album demos, mainly just Ben Howard. A lot of Ben Howard... Along with occasional bursts of Damien Rice for similar vibes, and Kayo Dot for when I'm in the mood for something a bit more intellectually stimulating.”
So, apart from your own stuff, not really anything heavy then. Is this audio fatigue due to your recording? Like what you hear with metal bands on the road, or is straight up preference?
“Yeah not much heaviness as of late, and I'd say it's more down to taste than anything else, although the fatigue plays into it a bit too. I tend to write and record for long periods of time. Writing sessions can go on all night, and a lot of that is just re-winding one section of music over and over again, swapping words in and out to fuck with the syllabic flow, etc. So after 12 hours of that I tend to want to just chill out, y'know?
But in general my tastes have diverted away from metal as I've gotten older. I have a deep and profound love for extreme art in all of its forms, but it's rare that I get in the mood to sit and be pulverised for an hour at a time these days. I'm generally more quiet and reflective than I used to be and my taste has come to mirror that.”
So despite being in, what many would call, a Deathcore band, you're not really a fan of the genre yourself?
“Yeah, not particularly. There are certain bands that full under the spectrum that I do enjoy, they have their place for me. But as a whole the -core scene has never really been my thing. Jack (Magero), on the other hand, is actively super into Deathcore and modern Death Metal, and I think Jonas (Johansson) shares a pretty similar mind-set to me.
I find it a pretty interesting position to be in. Being a part of the scene while not being actively invested in most of the music.”
Well that being taken into account, would you perhaps consider Slice the Cake to be a more "mature" Deathcore band? Considering the reputation the genre has?
“Without wanting to seem pompous, sure, to an extent. I do think we're doing a lot more than most Deathcore, but we've talked about this amongst ourselves a fair bit and we tend to come to the conclusion that we're just "good metal" or something like that. But, depending on who amongst us you ask, you'd get slightly different answers. Jack is totally unashamed about his enjoyment of -core music, and just writes the music he wants to hear, and isn't afraid to call it Deathcore. I've always been a bit more averse to the label myself, mainly because I feel like it conjures up a vibe of constant open string chugging and brodude beatdown vocals and that sort of stuff, and that plays into how I approach my lyrics and vocals. I purposefully try and put in a lot more substance than people might typically expect from a "Deathcore" band precisely because I know people are expecting less.”
So what is your lyrical approach? I know you're a spiritually minded person, how much does that play into your writing?
“Massively so. When we started the band I was in a very spiritually dead place, and then each album since then has been an attempt at summarising these small lifetimes, each encompassing their own arc of spiritual development. The Man With No Face was essentially about the experiences of establishing the real fundamentals of the path I've been on since around 2010 in this really raw way. At the time I hadn't really intellectualised the esoteric yet, and I've since come to essentially devote my life to my spirituality and to my endless pursuit of knowledge, of both the self and the exterior and the last few years is where things have really started solidifying into a much larger, clearer picture, and that's what I've been attempting to encapsulate in the new stuff. The "sprawl" of esoteric knowledge, the inter-relations between different fields and concepts and notions.
On our other work, I purposely avoided overtly spiritual/religious terminology, so that people wouldn't misconstrue the message and see that what was being talked about was fundamentally human. If you look through the entirety of The Man With No Face's lyrics, you'll find "God" mentioned maybe once, and somewhat pejoratively at that.
The new album, on the other hand, is more openly theological. I wanted to describe the things I've learned through the type of religious language I choose to employ on a personal level, but also to reveal the arbitrary nature of those linguistic choices, and to show that there is something fundamentally human lurking between, beneath and behind the words.
But yeah, before this album I used to write about politics and social issues, more straight up personal events and issues (usually veiled in grandiose metaphors.) The new album has veered away from those completely and is focused solely on matters of the spirit.”
So your upcoming album, Odyssey to the West, where is this album taking you spiritually? Or perhaps more accurately, where is your spirituality taking Odyssey to the West?
“Haha well, it's been on-going, and it's worked both ways. The whole idea was born of this story we started chucking around a few years back, around when we were doing Other Slices. We were gonna do these two EP's, The Man of Ash and Rust and The Man of Stone and Silver, and they were going to be these diametrically opposed works conceptually. Ash and Rust was going to be about dehumanisation via machinery, and Stone and Silver was to be about finding oneself through nature. These didn't end up happening but the roots of Stone and Silver spiralled out into something bigger.
I came up with this story about a pilgrimage to "The Holy Mountain," and was slowly pondering it for about a year or so, then Jack (with the aid of Jake Lowe of The Helix Nebula) wrote this album over the course of a summer, and the music really spoke of that journey to me. So I started trying to consolidate the story and the concepts, and I got this feeling like there was a lot that I wasn't seeing, like I needed to go and do a lot more learning before I was going to do the story any justice.
So I went out and started buying books that seemed relevant and just generally meditating on the ideas, letting them steadily sink in and integrate. It spiralled out of control so quickly and became this massive breadcrumb trail of ideas that would only ever lead me deeper into this interconnected conceptual web. I think the main thing was learning more about archetypes and how that plays into narrative structure... I was looking back at The Man With No Face at some point during all of this and I noticed that the overall narrative is basically exactly the same as this new pilgrimage. There's always a "man," there's always a cause to leave behind the old, stagnant ways in search of new and higher things, there's always this spiritual death that leads to a profound rebirth and revelation.
I started realising that there were characters in my other lyrics, that even un-named were fundamental archetypes that you can see in basically any story ever. I got given a set of Tarot cards around the same time, and I started learning those, and realised that The Major Arcana depicts The Hero's Journey if you lay them out in a circle and follow the symbolic path of events.
But even that was all pretty entry level compared to where it went. I eventually tired of the story, mainly because I was encountering trouble making it visceral enough. It got too stuffy and intellectual, too contrived. So I got on this tangent of wanting to tear it all apart. But I wanted to tear it apart with the narrative itself, have it be self-referential, perhaps even somewhat self-depreciative. I wanted to mock my own poetic grandiosity. And then eventually I ended up with this mix of both ideas, combining both the arbitrary narrative framework of the religious pilgrimage, steeped in allegory, with this meta-narrative collapse.
How this relates to my spirituality is hard to put into words. The piece is a reflection of myself, but has also reflected back upon my life outside of it. By writing it, by thinking about it, by putting myself cognitively in the places I've gone to explore the concepts, I have been on a bit of an inner pilgrimage through it all, one that won't be done until the last line is finally recorded.
And it's not just reflected on myself either. I think it's affected us as a band. Without wanting to say too much, we had a fairly turbulent time, all these growing pains where we had to figure out what we want from the band, where our motivations lie, how to work with each other as human beings, and it's all come around to this point where a well-oiled machine. It's been a pretty profound process as a whole.”
Would you say this new lyrical exploration is what gets you most excited about the new album? Or is it something outside of that?
“Yeah, it's not just the conceptual side that excites me. I think the new stuff is far more mature and focused on every level. The songs are far better than anything else we have ever done and pack a much bigger and more diverse emotional punch. I feel like the concept and music are a lot more unified than they were on our other stuff too. When Jack first started sending the original midi's of the tracks when they were totally fresh, they just spoke of this epic journeyman vibe, and so that pushed me further down my path with the writing.
And aside from all this, I feel like it's 10 times the album The Man With No Face was, and that album made us explode. I think we doubled our Facebook fan base with that album. We're a lot more established these days, and I'm excited to see how much this album will catch on, because I genuinely feel like we're on the verge of something really big.”
What has surprised you the most about the bands popularity since the release of The Man With No Face? When did you first really become aware of it?
“I think it first really hit us when we dropped The Man With No Face to be honest. Before then we knew we had some followers, and we felt like we had something really special back then, much the same feeling as there is in the air in the bakery right now.. But I don't think we'd really seen that it was this like. Potentially pretty serious thing that could go to bigger place. So when we released The Man With No Face and there was this huge influx in numbers on our page, large view counts on YouTube, lots of praise, etc. It was pretty fucking trippy. It was both expected and unexpected. Even now I think we all still find it pretty trippy that we've gotten to the point we are despite not really existing as a physical entity yet.
We had another jolt of that same feeling recently when we announced the Tech Fest set. We had no clue The Contortionist or Decapitated would be playing, so we saw the line-up the same day we announced it, and we all just... Fuckin' lost it. We all got super, super hyped about that.
The precedent that sets in my mind is just crazy. We still have no basis as a physical band yet. We have the members assembled but we're in full on album finishing crunch mode right now, so we're STILL "just" an internet band. But we're an internet band people believe in enough to offer festival sets too. It's pretty weird…
Weird and immensely cool.”
As you mentioned, UK Tech Fest is the first time the band will be playing live, how are you feeling about that?
“Nervous and excited. Mostly excited though. We want to hit the ground running and give people a show they'll remember, but none of us have gigged for years, and we've never played together as Slice The Cake, so it's kinda like... No pressure, y'know? But we're taking the attitude that it'll be good, because it kind of just has to be.
But yeah, it's amazing. We're all really looking forward to exploring bringing this band into the physical world. I can see that it'll affect how we create the music itself as well, and from talks between ourselves, none of us want to do another one of "these" albums, not for a long while. We want to explore new territory, and Tech Fest is our first chance to really spread our wings and do something totally different with Slice The Cake.”
Will the rehearsals be the first time you've all been in one room together?
“Indeed. We've all skyped and stuff but actually sharing a physical space with someone is always quite a bit different.”
Though I hear that it won't just be the three members of Slice the Cake on stage at Tech Fest?
“Yep, you heard right. We'll be joined by Connor Jobes of Nexilva on second guitar (he plays drums for them, but writes all of the material,) and Ollie Rooney of The HAARP Machine. We're still in the middle of sorting out a drummer, but that's looking very promising too.
Both of those guys (and the drummers we're looking into) are total instrumental monsters, so we're pretty excited about it. It's a weight off our mind too, knowing that they're the kind of calibre of musician that can just turn up at the practice room with the set learned inside out.”
I'm assuming you can't name any names quite yet?
“Unfortunately not. Nothing's set in stone yet on that front.”
That's fair enough. So while you're playing, Tech Fest, you're also attending. What other band are you most looking forward to?
“The Contortionist, by far. I wasn't much of a fan of their first two albums, but Language was one of my favourites from last year, so I'm looking forward to seeing them play that stuff live.”
Language was easily my favourite albums of last year. As a quick aside, what was yours?
“Hm. Probably Nero Di Marte - Derivae. That and Damien Rice - My Favourite Faded Fantasy, but Nero Di Marte takes it for me. I've not seen anywhere near enough love for that record, and I think it's incredibly special.”
One that sadly fell off my radar in the last month scramble to make my list. Which I already want to change in several places! Anyway, after UK Tech Fest, is there a live future for Slice the Cake?
“Hopefully, yeah. We're going into it with the intention of doing more afterwards, but we're using Tech Fest to test the waters and see how the vibe is and all that. Nothing’s set in stone right now though, and won’t be until we’ve played that set.”
You've recently announced you're working with Monolithic Music. How do you see that changing things going forward?
“Well, honestly, we’re not the most organised set of dudes. We’re all kind of Mad artists really, in our own way. I think for all of us it’s a pretty introverted process, and in many ways I find that just totally disagrees with the business end of things, or maybe that’s just me… Either way, it’ll totally smooth out the entire operation from top to bottom. Everything moves through Simon now, and we’re left more freed up to just focus on the art without having to worry so much about logistics.”
How do your label, Subliminal Groove, treat the band, considering as you've said, you're yet to become a physical entity?
“SGR are cool as hell to be honest. We're kind of just left to do our own thing for the most part, and SGR helps out where they can. It's not like the precedent isn't there already though, since the roster has this nice mix of solo projects and more serious live bands.
I mean you've got Nemertines, which Justin (Lee – Founder of Subliminal Groove Records) basically manages and does all the promo for and Sabrina (Scissor – Nemertines) just focuses on the art itself. Then you've got bands like Lorelei and Kardashev and all that being more actively supported as live entities.
What we've needed so far is to just be left alone to quietly do our work, and we've been given that. I respect it even more since we've been signed for a good long while now, and haven't actually put out any new material through them yet. But there's been no meddling, no hassling to get shit done. It's all been business as usual, but with Justin and co doing more promo for us, and helping handle some behind the scenes stuff.”
So will we actually be able to pick up a copy of Odyssey physically at release through SGR?
“By the looks of things, it'll be digital release first, then CD, and then vinyl further down the line. We have The Man With No Face CD's ready to go too, along with a re-pressing of Other Slices and the long lost Myriad Records era t-shirts that most people unfortunately never received. We'll have pre-orders for all of that ready to go sometime this month.”
Ah yes, the infamous Myriad Records. Does the "Baked Fucking Goods" Shirt number among those lost shirts?
“Indeed it does. We even have another t-shirt design from that era that nobody's ever seen, by the same artist of the gallows tee.”
Was it only me that didn't realise how much of a stoner that shirt makes you look before wearing it?
“Hahah, I don't think so, considering I never actually clocked that angle myself... Probably because I smoke a lot myself, how ironic.
But then people see more meaning in our band name than we do, so it goes to show! Despite all of our heady subject matter we like a lot of really dumb shit.”
I don't think you'd release songs about Genghis Tron if you didn't. I will always love Jack for that title.
“Hehe. I only just gave those guys a proper listen very recently. I feel kind of ashamed, considering the name-drop.”
Alright Gareth, I think that's about it. Thanks for talking with me. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
“No probs man, it's been a pleasure. And I guess not, aside from that we are super, super excited to see where this year takes us, and to see what people make of the fruits of our labour!”
Slice The Cake will release their new album, Odyssey to the West, this March on Subliminal Groove Records. You can listen to their new track here.
