John: So the first question is has every show been this good for you, crowd-wise?
Mario: I would say yeah. This is the fourth show, right?
Mike: Yeah.
John: Fourth out of how many?
Mario: Nine shows total. All east coast. We started out in Canada, two shows in Canada.
Mike: Those were great shows.
John: And you`re going all the way down the east coast?
Mario: We`re ending in Baltimore, I think.
John: And this is the first time you`ve toured over here?
Mario: Legitimately, yeah. We came out here with Saviours, from San Diego, out to New York, but we didn`t get to play all of the east coast.
John: You did one of those New York showcases?
Mario: Yeah. CMJ. Played Philly and stuff like that.
Mike: Pittsburgh.
John: So the live Earthless record. That was basically at the request of Walter, right? That was your second set?
Mario: The Roadburn record was... I don`t want to say an accident but it kind of was in a way. We went from being scheduled to headline the smallest room in Roadburn to the last minute getting thrown on the main stage because the headlining band of the night didn`t use up the whole set time.
I personally thought – we all thought – that it was a really good show, really memorable. When we got home, we got a recording of it and thought it was really cool.
John: It wasn`t even a planned recording?
Mike: No, not at all.
John: How do you pick your sets? Because you played twice at Roadburn.
Mario: For us, it was two sets. The first half was our newest material we`ve done, and the second was pretty much the Rhythms record.
John: How come you didn`t play that tonight?
Mario: We`d still be playing right now [laughs].
John: Again, how come you didn`t play that tonight?
Actually, that brings to mind a good question. You guys stretch out a good 15, 20 minutes. At what point do you think, “Okay, this has gone on far enough.”
Mike: I think it`s a general consensus that it might be stretched out too much, getting a little bit boring, at least for us. So we change it up a little bit. Someone will do something that we`ll all recognize as a change.
John: So you let one person pipe in and change the momentum?
Mario: Yeah. It could be, like a guitar feel going on, with a delay that will spark – to me – a fill to signal, “Let`s go back to this riff.” To us, it`s pretty structured, in a weird way. It doesn`t feel like we`re lost and just improvising, you know what I mean?
John: What percentage of the songs is improv jamming and how much is actually structured and thought out?
Mario: Every show`s different. It`s pretty flexible to adapt. If one part isn`t the exact same note as something else, I can adapt to that or he [Mike] can adapt to whatever I`m playing or Isiah can change. No one else will notice but us. “Oh, I`m sorry I fucked that part up.”
Mike: Generally, each part is structured. We know the parts, but if it turns into something we`ve never played before, we`ll go with it.
John: How you guys doing on the follow-up to Rhythms?
Mario: As far as a studio album?
John: Yeah.
Mario: It`s coming along [laughs].
John: Can we say you`re road testing them?
Mario: Yeah. For us, when the riffs come along... It sometimes takes awhile for a couple of really good riffs to stick with us. Once we have them, it builds from there pretty easily, sort of naturally. And we just start going with it.
John: How long... like the first track from the last album, how long did it take to flesh out?
Mario: From Roadburn?
John: No, from Rhythms.
Mike: “Godspeed”?
Mario: That was a quick one. That was something that was pretty accidental. I think Isiah or Mike had a basic riff to something to work on. A couple of things, I remember Isiah just fiddling around and we were working off that. For us, that was actually the first kind of really structured [song] we did. It had all these little parts.
John: With the A, B, C, D bits? That`s arty. You were all `70`s prog rock and shit there.
Mario: [laughs] That came together in a month, I think.
John: How live are the studio recordings?
Mike: Extremely live.
Mario: We do everything at the same time and then Isiah will lay down some additional guitar for taste. That`s pretty much it.
John: You guys gonna do more singing stuff, like the Groundhogs cover?
Mario: It`s not too much of a conscious thing. If a song comes about and it happens and it feels totally rad and right, we`ll go with it. I dunno. We don`t consciously think, “No vocals!” but we don`t really try either.
