With modern technology, bands across all genres now have the tools to really polish their music; but some folks are not into how polished music sounds nowadays, like Behemoth‘s Nergal, who thinks a lot of music has become too “robotic” sounding.
Nergal expressed these feelings of his during a recent interview with Heavy, sharing how there is “nothing organic” about so many of the modern records he listens to.
Nergal brings up these beliefs of his while talking about his efforts to make Behemoth’s latest album, Opvs Contra Natvram, sound more organic (as compared to their previous studio album). Here is everything Nergal had to say (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“Every band these days, you talk to every band, and every band — literally — heavy metal band, thrash, death, whatever, says, ‘Oh, we managed to get that organic sound.’ And then I go and listen to those records and I’m, like, ‘There’s nothing organic about this record.’ Ninety-nine percent of the records, they sound robotic.
“Every fucking click, every kick, every snare drum, every part of the record is exactly the same. It’s not organic. ‘Organic’ is when music fluctuates, when there’s dynamics, when it goes up and down. That’s why we tapped Joe Barresi [to mix the LP]. You know him for his work with Nine Inch Nails, Queens Of The Stone Age, Monster Magnet and a lot of rock bands. Slipknot…
“Basically, rock bands, mainstream bands. And he does this old-school mixing. He doesn’t use Pro Tools. I mean, he uses Pro Tools, but then, when he’s done with one song, he just pulls all the knobs down and starts from scratch.
“You go, ‘Hey, but I wanted to do some tweaks in the previous one.’ ‘Sorry, it’s done.’ You’ve got to pay for everything again. So [when] it’s done, it’s done. You don’t endlessly go and correct that, which is beautiful. Twenty, thirty years ago, it was done that way.
“These days, you can fucking perfect things to the point that you cannot fucking listen to it, because the perfection makes things boring, imperfect and a whole lot uninteresting. Live, it’s not perfect; that’s why it’s so fucking exciting.
“So why make things that are just so fucking polished? I don’t get it, especially in extreme metal music. It’s gotta be fucking weird, it’s gotta be dangerous. Where is the danger factor?
“So I really wanted to bring the danger factor back to our music. It was present, but maybe this is the record [where] it’s the most present ever.”
What do you make of Nergal’s points? Do you agree with him? Do you think modern music (whether it’s metal or other genres), sounds too robotic nowadays?
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