(Milena, I know you have all the interviews so you can post the direct KM quotes 
)
*deep sigh* yeah, I just dug into my interviews.
It seems to me that Mike is right about one thing...leaving the band is one thing...but refusing to have anything to do with it whatsoever (when he seemed happy to play the same style of music for people like Jim Matheos) takes it to a level that is a bit more personal. I think he had a problem with personalities within the band that he doesn't want to vent personally or publicly. He just avoids the confrontation by staying away. It might be Mike...but heck, it may have been John or James...but in any event, it does seem to be more personal than just a musical style change.
I think it's just that him and Jim are naturally completely compatible songwriting partners. There's a non-commital relationship between them, but it keeps them going back to each other because it just
works. They're totally independent together, since they can split all the duties between them, including producing; all they need is a drummer and someone to offer tips on how to produce the drums, and an album quickly comes together. When you think about how long Kevin hasn't put a Chroma Key album out, and how he essentially writes music as a pure form of personal expression, it's a pretty big thing that he's comfortable to rely on albums he writes with someone else as means of getting stuff out of his system; but that doesn't mean he didn't have a good personal connection with members of DT, it just means him and Jim get along that well. Especially musically:
"-What sorts of dynamics do you and Matheos have that keeps the partnership going strong?
We have different tastes; there’s a conflict because of that, but it’s not a personality conflict. It’s a musical conflict where we want different things to happen and have to work it musically. That’s pretty much the only thing that makes OSI relatively original. If it was just one way or the other, like the singer-songwriter stuff, electronic music or progressive metal, there’s a lot of people doing those things already. We managed to work with each other. We won’t reject ideas so much as change them. The worst thing that we would do is that if I don’t answer Jim’s email within a day or so, he sort of gets the idea that I’m trying to think of a nice way to say that we should try something else.
-Do you feel that you work better in that environment, where two heads are butting against each other?
No, I don’t think I do (laughs), but it’s not a personality thing. It’s just two genres butting against each other, but I like playing progressive music in the way that I’m allowed to. We don’t really butt heads at all; we get along pretty well."
"BW&BK: Do you find it difficult to reconcile the very different worlds of electronic music and prog metal?
KM: “Yeah, but I find it difficult to just write any kind of music. At least this gives me a few starting points. It’s easier, to me, than just writing progressive music or just writing electronic music. There’s people who do that better. Working with the two genres, they’re different enough from each other – almost natural enemies – that it keeps it interesting. It doesn’t feel like being in conquered territory, it feels like there’s still room to explore. There’s always conflicts between the two writing elements that keeps it interesting.”
BW&BK: Like you’re saying, there’s a real tension between the two styles… there’s the sparseness of electronic music and the non-sparseness of progressive music.
KM: “That conflict is what keeps it interesting, those identifying elements of prog and electronic music.”"
Well...remember that from the sounds of things, Mike and Kev had almost zero interaction during the OSI project. By my recollection, the Set the Controls cover came from the only day they actually spent together in the studio. I think Jim was the guy who got the two together...
"CL: So, when he sent it to you to put on the keyboards, was it, he already was thinking of it as a project with Mike? He had already abandoned the Fates warning album idea?
KM: Yeah. It's a little fuzzy area there about when he decided that Mike was going to do it, because I think he was worried about asking Mike to invite me into the project. He was worried about how Mike was going to feel about that. And then he was worried about how I would feel about working with Mike. So I don't know exactly what happened still. He mentioned Mike as an after thought. After he told me about the project and did I want to work on the project, and I was like, "yeah, let's do something together." He's like, "well this is who I have in mind for a drummer?"
CL: So he basically had both you guys lined up without telling each other?
KM: Yeah. There was something a little bit strange with that. And I was like, "yeah, that'll be fine."
CL: Were you guys not on good terms after you left the band?
KM: It wasn't like bad terms, we just weren't in touch."
"CL: No interesting anecdotes from the studio?
KM: Interesting anecdotes? No, I think one thing that Mike was talking about was that it was different for him because he had to take direction: just taking input. I was talking to him about what I heard as far as drum parts when we were recording in the studio. You know, "try this, try this?" And we actually tried it, not really tried, but recorded different parts, different drum parts for the same section of a song so I'd have something to choose from later on. A lot of the stuff I wanted him to do was very simple, without the triplet fills in between each beat. I think that day was sort of tense, because he's not used to working like that. He's used to just playing the stroke once, the way he wants to. He said that day was sort of hard, but he was happy. He even said that day, at the end of the day, that he realized that the record was going to be completely different. It was something new for him and he was excited about it, it was just very frustrating."
"-How did your involvement in OSI come about? I know you've grown out of prog-metal, and that led to your departure from Dream Theater in 1994.
After I left Dream Theater I still did a couple of project with Fates Warning. So, I stayed in touch with Jim (Matheos) more or less. Jim always gives me advice. He gives me business advice, like how to do stuff like music publishing. Whenever I have a question about stuff like that I always get in touch with him. One of these times he started telling me about this new project he was working on, and he asked if I'd be interested in working on it. I said sure. He didn't tell me he was already planning on doing it with Mike (Portnoy, Dream Theater). Jim said something like, "I have a drummer in mind, I don't know if you're going to be interested." (laughs) That's how it started, and then he sent me stuff down to Costa Rica. I played with it a little bit, and then sent it back to him and that was "OSI". That was the first song we really worked on.
-Was it difficult working with Mike again, because so many years had elapsed?
Yeah, it was impossible (laughs). I think it was difficult for Mike. He's been saying that he had a hard time taking direction on the drums, because I don't think that's what goes on in Dream Theater anymore. I think everyone just plays their own parts.
So he said he had some difficulty taking direction from me. I sort of sensed that when we were in the studio, but Mike and I were only together for about a week working on his drum parts. It wasn't that dramatic or anything. It was really a lot of fun to work the way we did, because he comes up with parts that I would never be able to even think of. Having his permission to work with it after he recorded it, y'know chopping it up digitally and reversing stuff, that was also a lot of fun."
Topic: Portnoy's comments on Kevin Moore (from Score commentary) (Read 14692 times)
