Bear In Heaven: Lasers Make All The Difference
Adam Wills of Bear In Heaven takes a moment to have a short chat.
Posted 26th July 2010, 8:50am in Interviews, by Hannah Hancock Rubinsky
About to get on the road after a short break between tours, Adam Wills of Bear In Heaven takes a moment to have a short chat. So I guess the best thing to start with is tell us about the latest album… the title is interesting, where did it comes from?
The title Beast Rest Forth Mouth? It’s a play on words, the directions East West North South and it's just kinda representative of each of us. There are four of us in the band and we each brought our own things to the band. Confusion is a little bit of a theme with the band so we thought jumbling up the words East West North South kinda made sense and we went with that for our second full length release that came out late 2009.
How do you think this differs from the other recorded material that you guys have put out?
It’s more focused. You know, the last, the previous record was a little more scatterbrained, piecemeal. We are still very happy with the previous record. This one though, we worked a little harder on it. Kinda had ideas of what we wanted it to sound like. Not specific ideas, but when we heard mixes as it went along, we knew what was good and what was not good. So we just worked a lot harder on it, as far as taking it more seriously. The last record was, lets put out a record, we’re friends, we have a few songs. The second one; we wanted to make it for real.
Did that have an effect on the recording process?
Well, all the band members have jobs so it’s a lot of squeezing in between time, sorta in between our day jobs or on the weekends or whatever, so you know, we recorded about 80% of it in our practice space, one instrument at a time. So it took forever. Which was good and bad.
Drove everybody crazy but made us think about the record a lot more. To sit with the songs and go, you know what, this part of the song is just dumb; we can take this part out. Or lets shorten it here because we can get the idea…this part of the song doesn’t need to be 60 seconds long, we can get the same idea in 25 seconds or vice versa.
We have been lucky with reviews… We have been getting people who totally don’t get it, you know it’s not a record that uh, which I think is a good thing, its not a record that really grabs you right out of the box you know. If anybody wants to listen to it, gives it 5 or 10 spins, then it really grabs you. Which is kind of cool cause you know, you could write a record that grabs you right off the bat, but I know how I digest hit records that I get hooked on for a month but never listen to it again. Those who reviewed it poorly either just don’t like it, or haven’t spent enough time with it.
The album artwork is totally trippy…
Thank you.
Is it wings or eyes or bleeding or what?
There seem to be a lot of interpretations, it’s like eyes crying or they’re veils or wings… um I just think it’s really nice.
I’m really proud of how it came out. We got this girl Laura Brothers who is based out of Ithaca, New York to do it. I found it online while I was perusing art blogs. I stumbled on her stuff about a year and a half ago, well before the album was finished, I emailed her and I was kinda like awestruck by her artwork, so I was like, 'Hey I’m in a band, here is our last record, could you do something for us?' In my mind it was like could you do a tour poster or a t-shirt or something like that.
We had ideas for the album art originally and they fell through because they were taking forever so I emailed Laura again like six weeks later and was like, listen we have like a month to set up our album art would you be interested in doing it? She called me three minutes later and like a week later she finished it. She is just amazing; she sent us catalogs of her art and stuff. Now she is like one of my best friends, it's really cool to be involved in one project and meet someone else on another project and it's not just cut and dry business, like here is $1,000 do an album cover for us.
On your Twitter feed recently you said something about a self-triggered light show, was that successful?
It was! We are still working out some kinks, nothing exploded… basically we take our visuals as seriously as we do the music side of the band… we have opened up for a bunch of huge bands where we were basically put in front of their lighting rig and you play with like one red light pointed at you and then maybe half the crowd pays attention. It doesn’t matter how good the music is, the next bands comes on and they have smoke machines and lasers and shit and it makes all the difference in the world.
It’s just more of a show and we are very aware of that. So we are doing a DIY version of that. We don’t have enough money to have a lighting designer come on tour, but we had enough to hire one to program lights for us. So we have lights and strobes and stuff. Immediately and frustratingly so, we are all linked by MIDI, its not easy but its possible to link lights to the music through that. Now I have a second MIDI controller at my feet so it’s pretty cool, I can just hit two and a bunch of strobes come on. It feels powerful as shit; to stomp on something and have a bunch of lights going off, it’s really cool.
Bear In Heaven's album 'Beast Rest Forth Mouth' is out now.
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