Almost a solid month ago, on the 9th of April – which was a clear and delightfully quiet spring evening, for me at least – I got in touch with Joe Tiberi, the brains behind the Chicago-based symphonic-industrial-extreme metal band Mechina, who in January 2015 released their 4th full-length album, titled Acheron. What was probably the longest interview I’ve ever done, we spoke a good two hours about Mechina, about his convictions, and eventually got thoroughly off-track by exchanging what we believe is to be the next step for us as humans, why we hate movie adaptions of games, and whether we are too sober for the conversation that we suddenly found ourselves in. Since the latter part of our talk was less an interview and more a pseudo-intellectual banter, I decided to cut the ending off, but the point is: if you ever get a chance to talk to Mr. Tiberi, I would highly recommend doing so, since he’s one of the more down to earth guys I’ve ever had the pleasure of interviewing. I’m not known for my punctuality, so a good month later, here it is – a very all-encompassing view into the life of Joe Tiberi and the workings of Mechina.

We can start off on a high, since you just released a statement to your fans that the first batch of your new album, Acheron, has sold out. Did you expect that to happen so quickly, being an independent band that doesn’t tour all that much?
It is still setting in, to a degree. A lot of the bands that I hang around with or work with in the studio, we always joke about how easy or how difficult it is to make a living in the Chicago metal scene. We all rip on each other for that. Music is one of the last places you want to get into for a consistent paycheck. We all know that and we joke about it, but we still do it. And now all of a sudden the support we’ve been getting through the Mechina site and bandcamp and all that – I wasn’t particularly expecting such an embrace. Usually our fanbase keeps growing slowly every year and we don’t promote too much, we let the music do as much of the talking as possible. But it’s pretty cool to see people wanting something physical, because printing CD-s alone is becoming a hassle and it’s cool to see the hardcore fans still wanting a physical copy. I’m not surprised by it (the reception) but I am too at the same time. It’s one of those things (Mechina) where you just gotta keep going with it and hoping more people will get interested. I haven’t had too much time to sit around and think about that.

I actually work at a record shop, that’s my daily job, and from what I’ve seen I do think the CD is a medium that won’t go away like vinyl did for a while. At the end of the day, a section of people always wants something physical, they want something that they could take with them and play when they’re going away somewhere, and I especially think for the lyrics. One particular thing that has developed in the CD industry that I’m not huge about is bands going for these really cheap digipacks, which contain nothing besides the CD itself. The booklet doesn’t have to be especially lush, but I’d at least like to get the lyrics when I buy a CD. I listen to some hip hop next to metal as well, and some of the new albums that I’ve bought on a whim and went home with, only to discover there’s not booklet there – it’s pretty disappointing, especially when the dude rapping goes really fast.
Right, everyone falls back on the convenience factor. You got to be careful as an artist or as a business owner in general. You don’t want to rely on the assumption that people are just going to find the secondary information on the internet. A lot of people think that if they (consumers) want the lyrics, they’ll find it online, or if they want photos. I’ve been guilty of this in the past as well. If someone wants something material nowadays, and excluding the convenience of just files on a phone or something, you (the artist) might as well go all the way. It’s not that much more expensive if you’re already paying for printing your own CD-s – from the little cardboard thing to a full jewelcase or the cardboard digipack that I’m a big fan of.

The format itself doesn’t really bother me, just when there’s nothing in it besides the cd!
Yeah if you’re handing out something material it needs to have substance.

Anyway, you said that you and guys from other bands are joking in the studio that it’s really difficult to make a living with music, which we all know, by this point in 2015. Do you have a day job that you do next to Mechina as well, or is Mechina your main outlet for everything right now?
I work in the studio almost full-time. When Dave (David Holch, vocals) and I started Mechina, we were like 16 years old, and that is also when I started getting some recording gear. And I’ve been doing production, helping people write, editing studio work since then. I guess you go big or go home. I chose a very dysfunctional career path, but it’s what I like to do. If I’m not doing Mechina stuff, I’m either writing with other people, or recording, or doing just studio work in general.

Then again it’s really cool to do something that you love for a living.
Well it’s good and bad. I always joke about never meeting your idol. Once you’re in and working on like thirty songs a week, seeing how they’re made and seeing the chaos behind it, and the cheating that you have to do nowadays to get it how people want it to sound like, then music, in general, kind of loses its grandeur so to speak. But I wouldn’t do what I do if I didn’t like it.

Since many of our readers might not be too familiar with Mechina, tell us a bit about the project in general and how all the albums under the Mechina name are related to each other.
Sure, after 2007 I believe is when we released our first album and pretty much everything 2008 onward is connected. We spent a few years writing Mechina when we were real young – some of us had just turned 21-22 at that time. It was a very weird time to start writing a multi-story-esque concept/album/trilogy I don’t know what you call it. As of right now, everything that gets written is written by myself or David Holch, the original lead singer (and has been so for a while). We’ve gone through so many band members back in the days when we actually played (live), but I found that being able to connect, say four albums together in regards to sound and story – being left alone and not having to play band politics has really opened up that possibility. A lot of people get turned off that we’re not a full four-piece or a five-piece, just two guys in the studio, but we wouldn’t be able to write and release as much music if we were touring, that’s for sure. With this project we decided to build a story. We are big gamers, total nerds about sci-fi stuff, so every awesome sci-fi game that people have loved, we’ve been all over it. It’s easy for us to create this stuff (the story) because we game so much, but we thought that taking a story and building almost a world over the course of many, many albums is something ambitious. I’m actually currently working with somebody who’s interested in taking some of the story elements from the early stages and putting them into a novel form.

I’ve been asked a lot what the story is about, and I’ll try to tell as much as I can, but it’s so scattered, because it’s all drawn from sound, which makes things both weird and interesting. To be able to build pictures literally with sound designs, adding sound effects and sound elements that you’d see in movies into a metal song – to do it to the extent of what I’d like to get it to be, it’s very challenging. That being said, where we’re at, we are considering eight albums to span the story, as of right now, but it could easily go to twelve as well (currently, four have been written). We’re looking at going over eight albums in regards to this whole story. The details of the story, if you want to ask, it’s so broad – have you got any specifics you’d like to know?

You don’t have to be really specific – let listeners explore it for themselves – but you can hint a bit what it’s generally about.
It’s very weird (laughs). There’s some people that made this wiki site for us, and there seems to be about ten people on it, and they’re all trying to figure out the story. I’ve actually been contacted by them to clear up some things, because it’s all interpretation. That is another reason why I like this big, drawn-out construction of a world in the course of multiple albums – the nerds in all of us love that kind of lore. But the basic, rudimentary idea that we try to address within the story is to be as broad as we can be. The main topic that we talk about is what utopia is and the concept of what utopia is – what that perfect, just world would be like. We try to delegate a lot of the topics and scenarios within the story to reinforce that question. On top of that is also a human element (what could we become and where we think we could end up). The story technically takes place in the future, but it starts from present day. We think that humans are going to evolve further and further, but evolution is a slow process. We try to address elements in people that we cannot shake, that are purely characteristic of us and that we’re unable to change. We also introduced a concept of artificial intelligence and the question whether it’s going to be good or bad, can we integrate it into humans etc. We try to take these broad topics and spin them around fictional elements within our story. We have a lot of anti-religious topics as well, but we keep it universal, we don’t like to pick and choose (between different religions). It’s not directed towards specific religions, as it is towards the concept of religion and the evolution of what we consider human.

When did you come to think that, “hey, we should do this epic story that involves multiple, multiple albums?” Was it from the get-go, from Assembly of Tyrants, or did the idea come along at some point? Empyrean and Xenon are intertwined, and now Acheron as well. Did the idea start with Empyrean, or was it already alight before, because technically you can see how Conqueror also bleeds into Empyrean?
Really after the Assembly of Tyrants album, our first officially released album. Assembly of Tyrants doesn’t have any connection to what we’re talking about here in regards to our main story. The story started with the album Conqueror, and every song we’ve released since has been connected to that story. After the Assembly of Tyrants album we decided to challenge ourselves with making a concept album, that became Conqueror, and in the later stages of writing Conqueror we realized that wouldn’t it be cool to keep going with this. Some people were like “I don’t know,” but as time went on it still came to be that way. To go back and correlate story elements from an album that you weren’t sure was going to keep carrying on, it was a helluva challenge, but we figured it out. We got the idea and also have future plans to release singles that should fill in more blanks. So from Conqueror onward we decided to keep going with it.

Conqueror came out on January 1st, 2011, but we started work on it in 2009. I have no idea what month it was. It feels like a decade ago, and it’s weird to think that it was only a handful of years. That comes with the blur of releasing an album each year – you don’t realize what time is anymore, I think.

As you yourself said, you do, at least have for the last three years in a row, release a new album each year, one per 365 days. Is it hard to keep a hold of that schedule, to keep at it, or because you don’t tour that much and since you’re in the studio pretty much constantly, it’s not? Is it hard to pump out new ideas, or is that something that comes naturally to you as a musician?
I think it’s both hard and not, to a certain degree. If I can utilize tools and brainstorm ideas, I work very good by myself. Creating content is not difficult, but the deadlines are, definitely. The last two albums, Xenon and Acheron, were some of the most difficult experiences in my entire life, to make them happen on time. After Acheron’s release I learned a lot of lessons about what I can’t (do). The last few years, we have started writing in June/July, and then we write pretty much all the way up to (their self set) deadline, because with this type of music you can fill in stuff here and there whenever you want. But then the editing and the tracking and the mixing all came down to the wire so last minute that I told myself that I can’t do that anymore. Acheron was the most difficult album to make within that timeline (with a release date set for January 1st). After learning the lessons from our last two albums, we took January off and let a month and a half go by, but we have already started to write new stuff by now. We have got a new single that is halfway done, and we are already brainstorming the next album. We are talking with some graphic art people and the guy who wants to put this (Mechina’s story) into a book format, so that’s forcing me to finalize story elements. We are hitting the ground running right now and we are going to be doing that all throughout this year. I’ve found that there’s gonna be a lot of time dedicated to post-production most of the time, because everything comes down to final touches and sometimes you have to sacrifice at the last minute (if you set too rigid timelines). Once you do it so often and you’re bummed out at the release date because you weren’t “done with it” (the record) – I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s not good for my health.

We are going to keep going with it though and hopefully this year we will be releasing a new single, plus we are re-releasing the last few albums, kind of as a director’s cut. We will be releasing a four-album boxset with added art. We are hoping to make something special this year, so that everyone can get that front-to-back element where you can press play and four hours will go by, four albums will go by, and it’s all cohesive. On top of that, we still plan to release the next album on January 1st, 2016. But one thing at a time, being a two-man show with this project, you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew.

But as I can understand, you’re still stubbornly going for that January 1st release date?
Oh absolutely! Why wouldn’t I haha? I find the challenge is an immense way of keeping myself out of trouble. Like “an album’s just got released, I better start work on the next one.” Just keep it going, keep it going. Unfortunately I don’t have an excuse for not releasing music often, considering that I don’t have the ability to tour. Both Dave and I, we don’t have the other musicians who would be available for that, and it comes down to how do we keep relevant, if we’re not going to be showing up from town to town. We just got to keep creating content and that’s the plan.

You said that you have a new boxset coming out, consisting of four albums. Does that maybe indicate that your next full-length album is going to go in a bit of a different direction than Acheron ended at?
That actually depends on the story, and we’re trying to fill that in. Acheron is immensely dynamic and we’ve seen that the opinion on it has varied. Some people have really liked how it’s heavy and fast and then drops off into something totally ambient, but other people felt that it dragged on for too long. What it comes down to is not as much a preference of taste (on Mechina’s part), but what you’re hearing is based first and foremost on the story. We plot out the story even before we write individual lyrics. A lot of the music is driven by those vibes (that emanate from the story). What the next album will bring, I have no idea yet. You just want to get consistently better and better at what you do. It is hard to say in regards to if I’m going to make a more brutal album for the sake of a brutal album, or do I make something dynamic like Acheron. It has to fit with the story and a lot of it is dictated by underline details. The next album could go anywhere, really. I actually haven’t started pondering how to connect it or how to start it off. There’s been a lot of (time) jumping between the last four albums. It’s a large process and it gives me a headache thinking about it all the time, you know. We’ll see how I manage with the boxset release, because that’s going to be a lot of work.

There’s definitely some time jumping between Mechina albums. Empyrean ended on this positive utopia note and then boom, Xenon comes along and proclaims it was all a dream!
I notice the confusion a lot on that wiki page that was created, with people trying to figure out what’s what. I realized that since there are such big jumps in time (in the story). Halfway through Empyrean the time changes by 500 years. All that in-between time hasn’t even been told yet.

So you have basically left the door open to use a tool from the film industry, by using sequels and prequels to fill in the gaps?
Yeah, best to my knowledge. I’m no film major or anything, so I don’t know the exact tricks of the trade, but I try to fill in blanks and make something that could be translated front to back. That’s why I’m saying the story can go four more albums or twelve more albums, if we really wanted to. It’s such a crazy way of writing, but it’s fun. It really challenges you to think on multiple fronts.

Yeah and everywhere you look, not even the metal world, but the whole of music world – I’m not sure that somebody has a more ambitious project at hand currently. I don’t know any other band who would say, at this moment, that they’re probably going to make twelve other albums.
I don’t hear that often either! We were joking about it at a meeting a few days ago, where we were gameplanning the next few months. Someone mentioned that do I think this is like a Guinness World Record type of thing, and I just said that’s a good question, but then looked and thought “who does that?” It’s (Joe’s vision) not a credibility thing, there’s zero superiority complex, it’s just a very stubborn approach to not letting something go. That’s just what it is – I’m in it for the long haul. I hate wasting time on things that just come and go. I think this is my stubborn attempt to convince myself that I can literally beat this dead horse to the ground, and do it cleverly enough that no one could tell.

For example, if I have a client who comes in and asks me to help them structure a song – or do any kind of production (guitars, drums) – they come in, we do that, and that song goes out the door. It’s out in the world then, it either hits or misses, but there’s no connection to anything else – it’s just a song, one song. I’ve done that enough where I want to carry this (his project) along. It could also be my attempt on roleplaying my own Fallout 3 fantasy through music. I like that game a lot (laughs). Maybe it’s Mass Effect as well, I don’t know. A lot of people joke about that.

Actually, one of the questions that I thought up when coming home from work was that if you had a game of your own choosing that Mechina’s music could be featured in, and you get to pick only one game, which would it be, out of those that are released? Which vibes best with what you’re going for with Mechina, regarding the feel and concept?
I can’t help but to say that, if I only had to choose one, it would be Fallout 3. That game is such an inspiration to sci-fi in general. The grimy, heavy stuff that we do, outside of any of the symphonics, really roots back to that type of atmosphere. I think that would be the closest game that I could choose.

You said that you are pretty big game nerds. Are you nerding out on movies as well? I myself, I’m not that much of a gamer, because I lost touch somewhere along the way, when I moved from PC to consoles. I couldn’t run along with the PC requirements at some point. I got bored with the idea of buying a new computer and still being behind a year later. Nowadays I play something every once in a while and then I am more into the medieval stuff with the Witcher and Skyrim type games. But out of movies, space sci-fi excites me, and one thing that I was wondering is that do you draw inspiration from space-themed movies as well, and do you happen to have an all time favorite space movie that you look up to?
To me, a lot of sci-fi movies, especially the recent ones, they never really hit it off for me in regards to the vibe. And trust me, I’m not a critic at all, I don’t watch enough movies even. I do think though that a lot of sci-fi movies have this silly aspect, have something Firefly-esque about them. Most of my inspiration comes from a lot of the stories from the gaming realm, versus the movies. The last sci-fi movie that I watched more than once was Prometheus, I loved the atmosphere of that movie.

I loved it as well. You can always find backers on the internet, but I’ve never met anyone in real life who truly believes Prometheus is on par with any of the Aliens, or 1 or 2 at least. But I loved it, I loved the fact it played out in the same world, but added a new dimension and opportunities to go from there (from where the first movie ended).
Aliens 2 is probably my favorite of all, I love that movie so much. But what people got to know is that Alien through Aliens 3 is a totally different time in movies compared to when Prometheus came out. It was never going to carry the same vibe. It’s like with the Star Wars movies. But I loved Prometheus and think it’s such a good movie. I’m definitely looking forward to the second one, whenever it might come out.

A lot of Mechina’s song titles have roots in ancient mythology, with names such as Tartarus and Erebus often present, which come from Greek mythology. Has reading old fables helped form your own writing style?
A lot of the names that we use, that are pulled from mythology, that’s our way of using symbols. One of the problems that we found is that when you try to do a story with only audio, you have to try and fill in the blanks well enough to have the listener kind of guessing, without knowing the lyrics and what they talk about. Then they can start filling in the pieces visually in their head – I think we all do that when we listen to music. The lyrics still need to mash, but why we use these mythology symbols and names is to help create a visual structure for someone who may not have any clue as to what’s going on. Then within the story those symbols are kind of used like the Roman numerals – these names have been adopted, because within the story, what’s happening on earth is not a simulation, all these worlds (in the story) are in our universe. So we considered that these mythological names are going to be used even on a new planet, let’s say we ever get to that point, we’ll (the humans) probably bring things like Roman numerals with us. That’s the analogy with our titles. They are names for guidance, but within the writing and outside of the story, they are more or less just symbols. For example, I don’t want to copy the story of Daedalus, although we have a titan called Daedalus. I never wanted the story behind Deadalus in our story to be analogous to the myth. I never wanted to do that, because that story has already been written a thousand times better then I could have. Ours is a slight interpretation of the name, and that’s about as far as it goes. There’s a connection, but not a definition.

Your fanbase is small but rather active. Would you say that you’re open to all kinds of feedback that you get? One good example that I have is Empyrean, and how you re-did the whole mix after hearing some complaints about the production side of that album.
We get passionate feedback, both positive and negative. Everybody now has a format on which they can speak their opinion, and they’re going to do it. I’ve tried to be as optimistic about constructive criticism as possible. Empyrean was really when that all happened. There were two criticisms, back to back, complaining about that mix. One was more facetious than it was anything of substance, just saying the mix sucks, fuck this, blabla, and then there was somebody who talked that if only the guitars were a bit louder, and I actually saw a trend of constructive criticism emerge. And of course I have to take that into consideration. If you write music and never release it, you don’t have to answer to anybody. But if you put it out there for people to absorb, for people to purchase, you do have to listen.

(Then again) We get a lot of people asking why there are no guitar solos, for example, and that (the question) is just something that I’ve accepted and also something that I don’t want to do. That aspect (the solos) never made it into the Mechina sound.

To be fair, I don’t think it’s even a valid question, because if you’re into guitar solos, there’s a thousand other bands who can deliver. These are the kind of questions that I personally don’t really understands. Questions such as why aren’t there any guitar solos, or why aren’t there instrumental breaks, or why isn’t there electro behind it. If you like those things and you know other bands that do it, go listen to those bands instead.
I find it interesting to see how hurt people seem to get over the whole deal. People nowadays seem to feel very victimized when somebody releases a song that wasn’t to their expectations. It’s an entitlement problem, I think, and I hate using words like entitlement. If an artist releases music and you stumble across it, and you listen to it, but it turns out being not what you’re into – a normal person just says I’m not into that and moves over, and looks if there’s something that they like elsewhere. But some people, out of sheer impulse (snickers), have to get really upset about it. And you can see it, you can see it in their writing. There’s no need for anyone to be upset that one band doesn’t make the style of music they like.

But, for example, I would never disagree that the production side of Empyrean wasn’t good. I know that there are people out there who saw what we were trying to do, and were pissed off that we didn’t get it, and that’s different. Those people are more like disappointed optimists. That’s fine, it means they wanted it to be the best it can be too. But THEN we fall into the conversation (about the album/project), and it’s an awfully subjective conversation, with everyone having their own tastes. But I do listen and read every message and every e-mail. As an artist, you put yourself on the line and let your stuff out for the wolves, and everyone’s got their opinion. Some say it’s the best thing ever, some say it’s bullshit, and that’s fine. You’re never going to please everybody, nor would you ever want to. But if you’re going to put your music out there, you got to listen to your fanbase to a certain degree.

The reason I say this is because during Empyrean, a lot of the people who were in the project at the time, as we started getting negative feedback about the production, and everyone (related to the project) were like fuck that, it’s fine, don’t worry about it, and I’m sitting there saying “wait guys, there’s a serious trend happening here; a lot of fans are saying the music’s cool, but the production’s in trouble.” But I also saw people who were just disgruntled people, and that amplified their opinion. Opinions are here and there. Some people might have a bad day and they take it out on something that they didn’t need to. Whatever. The internet can be a weird place.

To be brutally honest, if you spin Empyrean and Xenon back to back, the change in tone is just massive. I don’t think I have another band on my ipod or anything whose sound quality changes like that from album to album. So you definitely took some right steps and eventually got some good feedback on the production side of things. In the last two albums Mechina sounds a lot larger and has a lot more punch to it, and to me that seems to be what you’re going for with this project in general.
Yeah, Xenon’s my own personal favorite (as well). That is my favorite album, it’s my jam. I’ve listened to those songs more than anyone in the world and I can say that one was my favorite. Production-wise, even the change from Xenon to Acheron was noticeably different, and I’m finally figuring out how to do this (right). Trust me, there’s not a lot of good tutorials in the world teaching you how to mix orchestra with metal. There are a lot of technicalities. People have of course done it and have done it really well, but once again, being a two-man show and a small production, we have zero production funding outside of the sales we make. Everything is self-funded, which is (also) why I have my studio the way it is. That saves me a lot of time from having to go to another studio. As a result though, being the stubborn fuck that I am, I decided to learn and figure out mixing without ever going out and paying someone like a normal person would. And you don’t just mix it: once you write a song, and it changes forms three times, then you need to re-track everything, and when you’ve listened to it a thousand times, you’re instantly biased for mixing. That is another thing that I learned: if I have to finish recording literally the day of release, I’m not going to have a lot of time for mixing, because I do it all myself. That is why I’m starting earlier this year, so that I could have time to reflect on what’s going out.

The production stuff, I saw that trend happening almost instantly with Empyrean. Within the month (of January), I think, I went in and tried to do my reiteration of what I knew at the time (to be wrong) and what people were telling me, and did a remix. I gave it out for free. The people who bought the album, who weren’t super happy with the mix, I did the remix and gave it to them for free. I come from the world of PC gaming, and it’s a great analogy with the early acess games: the game is not done, so to speak, but you buy into it and help build it up. Eventually it comes out in its final form and when you go into the alpha stage, you get all the updates and stuff free. It’s not the same thing, but the same type of premise. This is an independent project, and we need to listen and work as close as we can with our fanbase in regards to what they want. I always say that I take 10 000 hardcore fans over a million passive fans any day. The passive fans will come and go, with so much music out there that they can recycle or go through, but the hardcore ones will stick with you from day one. Those guys are the same people who keep you wanting to do this, because they actually care, versus the “cool song bro, fistpump.” They’ll message you and be like “why are Dave’s vocals so quiet? ” and all I can say is I’m sorry, I ran out of time (laughs). But it’s great to have these so-called nerds behind you.

Has there ever been a comment on Dave’s vocals being quiet on any album? Because the guy is a beast, he has some of the best growls in the business, I’d say.
It came down to actual volume. I have always been a fan of the vocalist sitting just above the rest of the mix, but not by much. Being like another instrument. But there is a lot of metal where the vocalist is like two inches from your face, and the band is behind him. When you start putting everything together: the orchestra layers, the sound effect layers, guitars, drums, you need to fit the vocals as well (and it hasn’t always turned out perfectly). It even happened on Acheron, I’m not going to say the song, but I know there’s one song on that album where the vocals are obviously too quiet. But I need to remember that, if I listen to the songs 15 000 times from beginning to end, I’ll hear all the little things that nobody else knows about, and I need to remember to reel it back and not be so puritanical, because there’s so much stuff that I hear. There are Easter eggs in our albums that nobody knows about, and it’s funny sometimes to myself. But at least it’s not a huge issue, because then we would have to remix it again…which we are still doing by default with that boxset…it’s a weird life I swear.

You have also done some digital art for your albums on the side. Is that something that you do purely for fun, waking up some days and thinking that you have concepts from dreams or whatever that you want to literally pen down, or is that maybe something that you would like to expand on eventually, possibly design some crafty booklets?
It’s a combination of both. I’ve been trying to get into 3D art and figuring that out. Not Photoshop, but the 3D world of art. It’s an interest of mine and I’m trying to figure that stuff out. As a result, I was able to create a few (designs). I was thinking that if I’m going to put my time into learning this art, I’m gonna use it for Mechina too. I need art for Mechina, because I want to bring a visual aspect for these stories, and I might as well try to make stuff for it, while learning. I got successful a few times. I do have a good friend who is locked in with Mechina for doing its digital art. His name is Rickie Lewis and he did the Empyrean and Xenon covers. Right now, we are planning on doing around 50 full pictures, at least one picture per song, to put a face on what you hear, so to speak. We are looking to elaborate on the art. We want to release art in our boxset as a bonus with the discs. Excluding the novel, depending on when that might even culminate to a thing, but in the boxset there will be, at the very least, four albums inside of a book, with the art in it. That’s what we have planned. It is an endeavor; to make those is not a one-stop shop type of thing. It’s like the USB-s that we did – eventually you find the source and you can get them made. It just takes a bit of work, especially shipping overseas.

Yeah, the shipping kills. It’s like with Amazon, the prices on the CD-s are okay, but shipping is always…
The shipping is awful! Everything that gets purchased, the USB-s, the digipacks, I ship them out myself and I tell you, I feel so bad. We have had a handful of people whose CD-s didn’t show up, and since I needed to print more anyways, I’d send them new ones, but the thing is, to even get tracking on a normal cardboard thing for one of our digipacks is another 25 dollars on top of shipping, which is already about 12 dollars. And how do you charge one of your fans 35 dollars in shipping for something that costs 20 bucks? Nobody will spend 50 dollars on a cd, I’m sorry, doesn’t matter how good it is. So I have to ship these out in the good faith that their (the buyers’) PayPal address is correct. Everyone should have tracking at this point, but the shipping still sucks, it kills you. You can’t double-check anything and you just need to hope that it won’t arrive as nothing less than what it’s really worth.

I’m jumping around here with my questions a bit, much like I do in everyday life, but it’s fun that way, so before I forget to mention it at all, going back to the story of your albums, one of the central plots besides utopia is this fall of regimes built on wrong ideals. You are very opposed to tyrannical governing and like you said, you are pretty anti-religious as well. Would you like to comment on these anti-religious feelings that you yourself might have, even outside of Mechina?
In regards to the tyrant aspect, I think everyone has a little anarchy in them, and that’s good. You should never trust anyone who doesn’t, because everyone’s got to be skeptical. As a result of skeptical elements, the anti-religious stuff…I’m comfortable in what I feel in regards to that. We don’t make music to try and convince people to be atheist. I even despise that term in regards to it being another label that means nothing in the end. It’s not that we’re trying to make rebel songs to start a riot or cause any type of ill will in general. With us, it’s very much about asking questions, and that’s the safest bet. I don’t want us taking a stance on, really, anything, because I think every problem requires communication and dialogue. It would be very irresponsible of me to eliminate that (factor). As an artist in general though, you’ve been told that what you stand for and what you believe can change the world. We have seen it with big music stars that have a much louder voice, but (with Tiberi) it’s never been the way that I’m sitting down with pen and paper, trying to figure out how I could change peoples’ minds. Very much is drawn from my personal struggle on reaching where I stand on those topics, versus what they are. Everyone who wants to learn something has to go through that self-critical phase of weighing your options in regard to your position. So I’m more or less just asking questions.

My stance, you could read the lyrics and you would probably catch it really quick on how I feel about those topics, but that’s it. It would only mean that someone understood, but what people draw away from it (his art), that’s why I like implementing the story aspect. It’s more grandiose that way. I and Holch always rip on how many times can we yell into a mic how much God doesn’t exist. It’s like “we get it, we understand, write about something else now, it’s ten songs about the same thing, just worded differently.” Early on, when we where like 17-18 years old, in 2005-2006, we joked that if a band talks against God, they are obviously satanists, or at least that’s the link people instantly draw, that if you don’t believe in God, you got to worship the Devil. But no one ever said that we just don’t do any of that, and that’s where our stance was. Back in the day we were big into Vital Remains, and it was just sixty minutes of God-bashing at 280 beats per minute, and it was great to listen to, but eventually, with the lyrics, you just went “God, Glen Benton just won’t stop will he.” And we were like “well, this is what we believe, how can we say this creatively versus the stereotypical way?” And we decided to blend it together with a story instead of straight-up proclamations. Once in a while we’ll have one liners in our songs that are pretty straightforward and can be assimilated to the story, but are mostly about us being pricks, but sometimes you need to get that out of your system.

That’s interesting to hear for me, because I’m from Estonia, which is factually the least religious country in the world. About 20% of people say they believe in a certain religion. So the whole Satanism thing is waaaay beyond me. If somebody asks me if I believe in one singular God and I say “no”, then the usual response is “cool man, me neither.”
Yeah you’d think, but I live in America, man! Everyone makes fun of Americans, that’s fine, we get it, and we make fun of ourselves pretty damn hard too. But there are some things that make me go “this is why people hate us; this is why Europeans hate us, because we say that” and it’s embarrassing. With religious stuff, you can’t mention anything without referencing God in America. And it’s funny too, because I know a lot of people who are full of shit. I’m just gonna leave it at that.

It’s totally different in Europe. I’m not willing to go as far as to say that we are more accepting, I think we have our quirks as well, but nobody is as surprised as an American when you say that you aren’t religious. People down here are much less surprised.
In typical American fashion there is the joke that there’s two things you don’t talk about when you are at a party drunk: religion and politics, ironically. Two things, that nobody talks to each other about down here. There’s going to be no dialogue and if need be, I need to jump straight to assumptions. I don’t think I care enough though. I’m one of the big golden rule dudes: you can believe whatever you want. It’s the second it starts affecting me that things change. You can be religious all you want, that’s cool, just let’s not talk about it. I just don’t care, because it doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t want to have the discussion anymore in regards to who is trying to debate who on religion. Religion and is there a God are two different things, and everything revolves around politics anyway, and I don’t have the energy to dive into that.

To quietly wrap things up as well, I’ve got one more question that I’d really like to ask, and it’s a bit of a personal one. With the recent exposure and expected failure of the Mars One program, which was pretty visible in the media for quite a while, the idea of space travel has definitely been rooted in people, I’m certain. For you, what’s your opinion, if space travel was doable and you knew it could succeed, would you grab the opportunity with two hands, or would you like to leave the space realm as your playground, as something that you could revolve Mechina around and manipulate with your own will.
First and foremost, when Mars One started asking for people to sign up, I actually did sign up for it, just in case. No one has done that before and I want to write an album on Mars, fuck that! I could convince them to do that, do a whole documentary about it, it would be perfect! But I haven’t heard back. I would gladly one-way trip somewhere where I could land; on another planet. Life is pretty boring when you look at it, man.

Yeah, let’s be honest, when you’re our age, early-to-mid 20s, you don’t do new things all that often when you think about it, which is real sad. If you do one new thing per month, you can be glad with that.
I can go anywhere on the world on the internet, and it bums me out! I got no money, I can’t go there, I can’t do that, and then you just keep working. But put a space suit on me, take a photo and send me away on a one-way rocket, that would be just the greatest thing, that would be awesome and I would do that. A lot of people should want to do that.

But here’s where the problem arises. I’m not a physicist, I’m not even that great with math, what I’m saying is just everything I’ve been looking up regards to space travel. Lately I had to go through a very arduous process of doing basic math on my computer, trying to figure out whether this was real or not, because there’s a part in the Mechina world where, during the events of the album Conqueror, one of the ships, which was actually the first Titan, the Anicetus titan, left earth, carrying thousands of people – like a seed ship. It left to our nearest star, not nearest galaxy, nearest star, so I went on and found out how many miles it was from here to there. I did this to see whether or not the time frame from one album to the other could make sense. In the mesh of all these numbers and explanations, after my brain settled, I realized that I would be very surprised if any human being ever gets outside of our solar system. And I mean ever. It’s really depressing too, because even if you could go really really fast – the numbers are ridiculous, I lost track of where my commas are often – the scale of our solar system, let alone the milky way galaxy, let alone the universe itself – no one can really comprehend the distances and how the faster you go, the more radiation you put on your body. That means that even if you could go the speed of light, you would probably just die from radiation. There’s also a term called time dilation, which more or less means that the faster you go, the slower time goes by. You could be rippin’ it through our solar system like every good video game, but you’re going so fast, your clock says you’ve been gone for 10 years, and you get back to earth after going so fast for so long, and actually 35 years has passed. And that’s all in our solar system, and we don’t even have ships that can go that fast. It’s a depressing conversation to have about space travel, because I don’t think we are going to make it, ever.

We can already see what’s happening to earth by itself: ecosystems are failing, governments are collapsing, it’s a great ol’ circus. And NASA, and other institutions like that, are getting their funds cut. Our generation, as we are getting old, we might see someone put their feet on Mars, but that’s it. We need to take into consideration what’s going to happen to our Earth. People were saying that we could probably get someone down on Mars in about 2050. That is 35 years from now, when we might achieve that, and that is if all things go according to plan. I will be in my 60s by then. Unless something or someone really twists physics where we will be able to do crazy quantum stuff, I think it might suck for us. We always talk about space travel, that we are going to get there, but people don’t realize that landing a person on Titan, the Titan moon, versus Mars, is still a totally different ballpark in terms of distance.

That, in general, is how I feel, and this (Mechina) story is my way of traveling outside the solar system. What I know for sure is that by the time anyone can go outside our orbit, I will be too old and too broke to get on board (the ship). My body will not be able to cope with that, once that option is available. When you look at the scale of the universe, every story that was ever written about it, chance are, could be plausible – that’s how big it is. So it’s interesting to fill in the blanks in regards to universe. That’s probably where the story stems from. It’s a way to go there (space) without actually being able to, you know.

Yeah, and the illusion that remains is actually pretty cool. I think what you said is really nice: the universe is so big, that your story might be true as well. You never know, you won’t see it with your own eyes, but there’s this doubt that maybe your imagination is something that’s taking place somewhere someplace. Who knows.
Even the multiverse concept is such an interesting discussion. I am sitting in a chair right now. I could do twenty things in a split second, but I only choose to do one. Hypothetically in another universe, all those options were met. It gets very weird like that, but we have all seen videos about the scale of the universe, where all you can do is sit back and think “you got to be kidding me.” And then you’re telling me that not a single thing out there exists except this planet? Once you accept the probability, you agree that chances are there’s that, and that, and that – that there’s just so much out there.

Mechina – Vanquisher

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Facebook
Homepage
Lyrics
Bandcamp
The Mechina Wiki