Visit more, Nick. You're awesome! Say, have you heard of............ KrotchRaut?
I'm fighting off the strong urge just to ban you now. Don't scare off the guests!
Reading Nick's interview again, this is really exciting, Nick gives us a great vibe regarding the whole process. Snowfall was the best cd of 2009, and This Mortal Coil very well could have the same potential.
For anyone who wants to read, the interview from
www.wpapu.com is being printed below.
Nic Van Dyk of Redemption
Interview conducted: April/May 2009
Interview posted: May 1st, 2009
Official Redemption PageSince 2002 the band Redemption has sent waves through the progressive metal community. With three studio albums under their belt Redemption has just released their first ever live set, Frozen in the Moment: Live in Atlanta, a CD/DVD package set released March 3rd via InsideOut Records. The show was filmed during Redemption’s headline appearance at 2008’s ProgPower Festival. When Prog and Power Unite is privileged to have a few words with the band’s mastermind, Nic Van Dyk, with additional questions being submitted by you, the fans.
PPU: First of all, thank you for agreeing to do this interview. Let’s start with something easy and general… what has personally been the best part of heading Redemption?
NVD: Honestly, the experience of touring with Dream Theater, playing on big stages to thousands of people, was pretty surreal and a real milestone in terms of what Redemption has accomplished thus far.
PPU: What would you say was the definitive artist, concert, or musical experience that really inspired you to pursue music as a career?
NVD: The defining moment to learn guitar came from hearing Gary Moore’s solo from Shapes of Things to Come. The defining experience that led me to actually release music came much later, and was basically the night I met Ray Alder. Becoming friends and ultimately sharing my music with him gave me confidence and credibility to attract other musicians and label interest.
PPU: If you had the opportunity to join any band, at any point in their career, what band would it be and when?
NVD: I would say Rush, probably on their Test for Echo tour. Not so much because of that CD, but because that’s what they started doing “evening with” shows where they play for 150 minutes. Performing live is a huge rush (no pun intended). From a studio standpoint, probably either Iron Maiden circa Piece of Mind or Rush circa Moving Pictures.
PPU: As a huge fan of Rush myself I can really appreciate what you’re saying about the switch to the evening with format. But the pendulum swings both ways I suppose, as of not too long ago a band like Redemption would not have had the chance to open for Dream Theater as they were doing evening with tours up until the Chaos in Motion Tour. I’ve been able to talk with Redemption’s bassist Sean Andrews on a couple of occasions and I know he is a big Rush fan as well, is this a common influence throughout the band, or just for the two of you? And are there really any bands that a big group of musicians like Redemption can generally agree upon?
NVD: Sean, Chris and I are ravenous fans. Chris knows, I am pretty sure, their entire catalog. Sean knows a lot of it, too. At rehearsals, they would always just start fooling around playing stuff like Digital Man, flawlessly, of course, and I could never keep up unless they played one of the 10 or so songs that I have committed to memory. Greg, Bernie and Ray are fans as well, but probably not as over the top as Sean, Chris and I are. When we were in Toronto on tour with DT, we broke into YYZ in the middle of Bleed Me Dry. It was just too tempting not to – here we were, in Toronto, playing on Rush’s hometown stage where they had played a month before us, and there’s a little break in the song where I normally played two bars of Spirit of Radio before resuming the rest of the track. So the night before we decided to do the intro to YYZ there instead and the crowd response was amazing. This is captured in some of the bonus materials on the DVD.
PPU: What group of bands would you most like to tour with? (Aaron, Texas)
NVD: The Dream Theater guys were fantastic to us. We had a lot of fun with Into Eternity as well – great guys. I’d love to go out with DT again. I think it would be fun to play with Symphony X as well. Threshold is another band that would be musically compatible and it would be a lot of fun to try to do some shows together with them – I think the fanbase would be very complementary. We’re friends with Evergrey and it would be fun to play with them. Kamelot, also, seems like a good match. At the next level, opening for somebody like Rush or Iron Maiden or Heaven & Hell is something that would be a dream, of course.
PPU: I first saw Redemption live during the Chaos in Motion tour in 2007. How was your overall experience in regards to touring with Dream Theater? (Chris, Maryland)
NVD: 100% positive experience. They were very good to us, and their crew and management was fantastic. We got along very well, had a lot of fun, and got great exposure. I really hope we have the opportunity to do it again sometime!
PPU: I (Nick) was at the final three shows on the tour you did with Dream Theater, and I have to ask about that final show in Philadelphia. For those who don’t know, you guys all dressed up as giant ants, which of course was a play on Dream Theater’s artwork, and then I believe Ray Alder chased you guys around stage during Dream Theater’s The Dark Eternal Night dressed as a can of Raid. Who came up with the idea for this shenanigan, and was there any fun happening behind the scenes that we don’t see in the bonus footage of Frozen in the Moment?
NVD: Well I have to give Ray credit for the inspiration, but I will take credit for the perspiration. Ray mentioned off-handedly about midway through the tour that it would be funny if we all ran onstage in ant suits. I don’t think he thought anything would come of it, but I had this vision, including one of us dressed up as a can of raid chasing the rest of us around. I cleared this with DT’s stage manager, of course, because we wouldn’t do something like that without clearance. Then Bernie and I went shopping. I spent most of the day making the outfits…ultimately there were four ants (me, Ray, our tour manager Mike and Bernie) and our keyboard player Greg was the can of raid. I spray-painted a trash can yellow and wrote “Raid” on the side and then got a red lampshade that looks like the spray-button for him to wear on his head. We had a blast – it was fun as hell. Mike laughed, I even saw the implacable John Myung crack a smile. John was too focused on his guitar playing to notice. Jordan did a double-take. All in all, it was in good taste and everybody thought it was fun. Most of this is captured pretty well on the DVD.
PPU: Which do you find more rewarding, writing the music or the lyrics? (Alex, Pennsylvania)
NVD: Generally speaking, I enjoy music more than lyrics. Of course at their best, the two are related, with the music complementing the meaning of the lyrics and vice versa, but I can get the emotion from the music more readily than just the words. I’m also a perfectionist and while I constantly find things I would change about both, there’s usually less that I want to change about the music than the lyrics.
PPU: Do you generally build a song around a lyrical theme or concept or start with music and basically build from the ground up?
NVD: It can vary. To take two opposite examples from our last CD, The Origins of Ruin, the intro guitar part to the song Fall On You is something I wrote sitting down with an acoustic. I remember hearing the melody line and coming up with the one vocal line “run faster now, don’t look back till you’re far away” but the rest of the song was written before any other words. Conversely, the song Memory came together in snippets but I vividly remember being on a golf course, by myself, when the melody and words “I don’t want the emptiness that a spotless mind would bring” came into my head, and I wrote chords to support that melody line. So it’s a little of both – the music probably comes first most of the time, though.
PPU: Do you usually write out guitar solos in advance or just improvise them when you record?
NVD: A little of both. Typically I’ll hear something in my head that will fit as a signature motif in the solo, and I’ll either begin from there or write something up to it depending on where it falls in the solo. Usually I’ll combine spontaneous performance with writing, or I’ll play something spontaneous and then modify if it it’s not quite on the mark. I’m always mindful of something that Dave Meniketti from Y&T once said: a solo should have a memorable beginning, and memorable end, and something to chew on in the middle.
PPU: How often do you spend critiquing your music and particularly lyrics? Do you consider yourself a perfectionist when it comes to your music?
NVD: As I intimated above, I spend a LOT of time doing this – more than is healthy, probably. When I hear our music I think of what I’d change, whether compositionally, lyrically, production-wise, etc. Thankfully there is less and less as time goes on, which hopefully is indicative of improvement as a songwriter.
PPU: As someone who's never heard your music, where would you personally recommend I start, and why would that be your pick? (Matt, Wisconsin)
NVD: I would start with our most recent CD, The Origins of Ruin, and if a song had to be picked I would probably choose Fall On You, because it runs the gamut from some of the more technical stuff, some of the more aggressive stuff, but also some of the more melodic stuff we do. It’s hard to pigeonhole a single song. The common theme in our music is what I would call emotional and musical urgency. That can be conveyed a number of ways – sometimes it comes across more aggressively, other times less so. So any single song can be misleading. Unless, of course, you want to devote 16 minutes.
PPU: What is behind the lyrics and inspiration for the song Sapphire? (Bill, NJ)
NVD: At its most basic level, Sapphire is about a painful end to a relationship, one without closure, and being doomed to wonder what might have been. It’s an aggressive, sweeping progressive metal love song, I suppose.
PPU: Is the song "The Fullness of Time" based on a personal experience you had or that someone you know experienced?
NVD: Sorry to say, it’s something I experienced first-hand. I was betrayed by a friend, and I went through feelings of tremendous rage, disappointment, and self-doubt before ultimately moving on. Frankly I’m still pretty heated about it so maybe I’ve got a bit more growing to do. J
PPU: What was it about Stephen King's "Desperation" that inspired you to write a song about it?
NVD: It’s funny; I’m not the world’s biggest Stephen King fan. But I do think in those instances where he tackles a “big” subject, as he did in this novel or in The Stand, and he gets it right, it’s pretty compelling fiction. In the case of Desperation, the novel is really an examination of faith, and my sense is it is at least somewhat autobiographical as he wrote this after a near-death experience and the transformative character in the story is a writer who has been tortured for years by self-loathing and he ultimately embraces faith – not a simple-minded faith or a blind faith, but a reluctant one that accepts the ugliness and difficulties and irrationalism of faith without apology. It’s a beautiful story from that perspective and, I feel, quite moving. Of course now I don’t plan on adapting any third-party stories for more songs and I think that whole process is a little sophomoric, but I’m at least proud of the source material I used both for that piece and for Something Wicked This Way Comes.
PPU: When people familiar with the music of Redemption watch Frozen in the Moment for the first time, what do you think they will be most impressed by? What aspects to seeing Redemption live do you think are special in general?
NVD: That’s a good question. I think Redemption is a special band because while there is good playing, we aren’t about virtuosity – people either connect with the emotions our music stirs or they do not. I think, in all modesty, we’re pretty tight and there are some very cool technical sections (the end of The Suffocating Silence is one part, the pre-solo technical section in Sapphire which is pretty nuts is another, etc) that are fun to watch. Our drummer, Chris, is a lot of fun to watch. And our keyboard player really gets into it, too. All in all, it’s a fun DVD to watch.
PPU: Are there any particular moments from the Frozen in the Moment show of which you enjoyed? Any certain songs that you always love to play?
NVD: I love the beginning of our shows…the rush of hitting those first notes in Threads was one of the special moments for me on that tour. I also really like The Suffocating Silence. We play it very up-tempo and heavy, and the technical section at the end is a blast to play.
PPU: Can you briefly explain to me what it was like recording Frozen in the Moment, and what went into taking that performance and making it into the product that will be in my DVD player very soon!
NVD: It was a great set of circumstances. We’re part of the ProgPower family, as I’ve been a friend of the organizer from the very first one and we’ve performed there before, albeit as a much less experienced band. We had the advantage of the tour with DT to work ourselves into shape, and we were going to be playing to a “home crowd” of sorts – they didn’t come just to see us but we fit into the bill pretty well. The setup there, from the cameras to the audio, is totally professional – the promoter does an amazing job. And he had been putting out DVDs of the performance for a number of years so it was a matter of negotiating a deal with him to get our own film, and making sure we got the audio as well. From there, it was a matter of showing up and feeding off the crowd. We had a blast with that performance. The finished product is very true to the actual performance – no overdubs or re-tracking or stuff like that. I think it adds a human touch to it – we’re pretty tight, but you can tell it’s an authentic performance.
The process of editing the video was a lot of work. I did it myself using Final Cut and it wound up taking a very long time, but I think it was worth the effort. Putting together the bonus materials was a labor of love, but we had so much good material and so many memories from the DT tour that I wanted to preserve that I knew we had to do something pretty special with it, and I think the bonus materials are really, really cool. I’m very happy with the quality of the audio, and I have to credit Matt Crooks for mixing and Ty Tabor for mastering. The package turned out great from my perspective.
PPU: I believe Redemption is currently working on a new studio album, how is that coming along?
NVD: As I type this, we are almost finished mixing and will be turning the master over to Inside Out in a couple of weeks. Hopefully the CD will be out late summer.
PPU: Is the forthcoming album going to be generally in the vein of the previous two albums or will it show more experimenting in new territory?
NVD: The materials are a little more varied than the last CD, although people won’t be scratching their head wondering what happened to Redemption. Expect very heavy prog metal with big choruses and a balance between technicality and economic songwriting. We do some heavier stuff than we’ve done before, and we have some more sweeping prog stuff as well. I think our fans will really enjoy it – we’ve had a lot of fun recording it.
PPU: What is the probability that Redemption will do any form of headlining touring here in the States on the next album?
NVD: I think a major headlining tour is probably not in the cards – we aren’t big enough yet. J I think we will play some shows, though, and I’d love to team up with some other prog bands, or obviously if we got another opening slot that will expose us like the DT tour did, that’s something we’d jump at.
Links:
Official Site:
https://www.redemptionweb.com/Myspace:
https://www.myspace.com/thebandredemptionInsideOut Records:
www.insideout.deRedemption Is:
Ray Alder - Vocals
Nicolas van Dyk - Guitars and Keyboards
Bernie Versailles - Guitars
Sean Andrews - Bass
Chris Quirarte - Drums
Greg Hosharian – Keyboards
Update on Redemption’s 4th Studio Album:
Hello folks. Been a while since an update...hopefully for those interested the DVD has been a good means of tiding you over, but we will have new music out in the next few months and I can share some details at this time.
Redemption's fourth CD, Snowfall on Judgment Day, is expected to be released this summer worldwide through Inside Out. The album is currently being mixed and mastered by our good and talented friend Tommy Newton, who produced our last two CDs and whose work also includes Conception, Helloween, UFO and others, at Area 51 Studios in Celle, Germany. Artwork will once again be by our creative visual partner Travis Smith.
Musically, we have continued to grow and expand on the basic Redemption formula. We have continued to push the envelope of heaviness combined with strong melody and emotional urgency in the music and I think the collection of songs is very strong, with some very in-your-face tunes that are among the heaviest in prog metal to some quieter, more elaborate moments, with technical thrown in where it belongs.
The tentative track listing is:
Peel
Walls
Leviathan Rising
Black and White World
Unformed
Keep Breathing
Another Day Dies
What Will You Say
Fistful of Sand
Love Kills Us All / Life in One Day
I am particular excited to report that Another Day Dies is a duet between Ray Alder and a very special guest vocalist, James LaBrie of Dream Theater!
Once a firm release date is set, I'll provide another update. We're really looking forward to getting new music in your hands.
Thanks again for your interest and support!
Nick van Dyk, Redemption