With a self-released EP on the horizon, a European tour about to kick off in a few weeks and an animated video making the rounds, things are busy for Canadian grind freakazoids, Fuck the Facts. More so when you consider they’re doing this all by themselves now, a fact I wasn’t made aware of until the first respose to the first question. Guitarist Topon Das and vocalist Mel Mongeon took time away from their FtF-related workload (not to mention caring for their daughter) to talk to the Deciblog about all that’s going on.
Why, especially considering that you’re signed to Relapse, are you taking on the burden of self-releasing and promoting this EP? Don’t you have tours to go on? A kid to raise? Do you hate sleep that much?
Topon: I think there’s this voice in our heads that keeps telling us that this is a brilliant idea. It’s only after we’re knee deep into the process of doing a self-release that we really realize how much fucking work it actually is. As I write this interview, we’re preparing to leave for a European tour in three weeks, I’m dubbing and assembling cassettes, talking to the folks pressing the 10″ vinyl and trying to get records in time for the tour, taking my daughter to gymnastics class, working on new FTF songs that we’ll start recording next week, e-mailing and talking to fine folks like yourself to promote the new EP, mixing other peoples music to pay my bills, and somewhere in there I’ll find time to make a sandwich and hopefully play some guitar. Where do I find the time? I don’t. Everyday is waking up to a check list of things to do and I do my best to get it all done, but most of the time I’m squeezing things in just before the deadline, kind of like this interview. All that being said though, there is an excitement to all of this, and when things are going well it’s an amazing feeling. We handle all the pre-orders, merch, promo, booking, etc… so we’re constantly in contact with the people that are into what we do and having that personal contact makes a real difference and puts a face to your audience. There’s a lot of people that we always recognize their names from orders and over the years we see these people at shows or we talk on-line and we’ve created friendships like that. So we’re not playing to a faceless audience, we’re making music for ourselves and our friends. We actually just finished our contract with Relapse, but even when they were releasing our albums it was the same thing. We would hit the pavement and contact magazines, radio stations and blogs, we were booking our own tours and doing everything we could to get the word out. That’s just how it’s always been for us. As a band, we don’t make anyone any money doing this and I’m sure Relapse never made any money putting out an FTF album. We just do this because we’re proud of what we’re doing and excited to share it with other people.
In what ways do you feel Amer differs from previous Fuck the Facts works?
Topon: Everyone is involved in the writing, and this might be one of the releases that is the most balanced in everyone’s involvement. It’s what I like to see and what I really think makes a “band” and not just a group of people playing one guy’s songs. But mainly, this EP is just a different group of songs. We’re constantly writing, and how the music gets split up into releases really just depends on when it comes together. I would like to think we’re getting better at what we do in respects to writing, playing and recording, but I’ll spare you the classic “This is the best thing we’ve ever done!” line, because from a personal point of view I don’t think it’s the best Fuck The Facts release. That’s probably not something I should say in an interview, eh? But I have my personal favorite release and I think it’s important, that even though I started this band, it needs to be bigger than me and my ego. I want it to be a representation of the five individuals involved and that takes a lot of compromise from everyone.
How was this batch of songs written? Any differently from the past? Are you refining or finding it easier to attack the writing process with two members of the band living 5/6 hours away?
Topon: The base of every song on this EP started as a demo one of us wrote on our own and was then sent to the rest of the band. We have a Dropbox that’s overflowing with demos and ideas. Some of these have been sitting there for years and some newer songs get put ahead of the queue when we dig them more. It all depends on what we feel like doing. For this EP we started with seven different demos and the first thing is our drummer Vil learning all the songs and putting his own twist on the songs. He plays guitar as well, and writes in the band, so sometimes there’s not much of a change to the drums, but some of the demos can be pretty rough. Then Vil and I get together and just jam them out for a while. As we play them things will slowly change and we’ll come up with new ideas and structure changes and even riffs change. After that we start pre-production demos, sometimes we do a stupid amount of pre-prods, but I think there was only one for this EP. There we get to really hear how the song will sound recorded, make adjustments and try different ideas. Usually we record just before a long tour. That’s our deadline. So we recorded all the drums for the Amer EP before our European tour last year and did the guitars and bass sometime after we we’re back. Mel did the lyrics and vocals after everything was recorded. That’s how the EP went, but sometimes Vil and I will write stuff by just jamming. That’s how pretty much 90% of our album Disgorge Mexico was written, and is my preferred way of writing. There aren’t really any rules to how we write and things are always changing as life changes and we have to adapt. It gets easier in the way that we’ve all been doing this together now for over five years, but the long distance thing is definitely tough. We play way more shows than we ever have full band practices, which can be a bit stressful when you’re trying to be a well-oiled machine. But I think in general we pull it off pretty well because we all make sure we have our shit together on our own end, and it does make it pretty exciting when we do actually jam as a full band.
I’m assuming the EP recorded/engineered/produced by yourselves as well? How difficult do you find recording yourselves and being able to objectively stand back from performances and takes in the quest to get the best out of everyone?
Topon: Having our own studio space and being able to record ourselves is really awesome but it involves a lot of discipline. The biggest problem we ever run into is having things drag out, because we don’t really have to look at a clock and there’s no one rushing us to get shit done. We haven’t really gone into a studio, recorded everything and then released it right away since we did Stigmata High-Five back in 2006. Die Miserable was released almost two years after we had recorded it, and Amer is over a year since we started recording it. Even now we have some unfinished recordings waiting to be done. But it’s something we’ve gotten used to. We work with the backlog and always have different recordings and releases in different stages of completions. Maybe it’s not the ideal way to do things, but it just seems to be the way it naturally works for us and more importantly; the way we can make it work around our everyday lives. Performance wise it’s never been a problem. Everyone in the band is more than concerned enough with what we’re doing and we’re not going to let a shitty take pass. A release is never done until it’s been sent off; we’re always open to making changes and having our own space leaves us the time to do that. So it’s sort of a double-edged sword because we have all the time we want, but if we get carried away with that it’ll never get done. For the mix of this EP, I gave myself a strict two week deadline. Two weeks is a long time, but anyone that has mixed their own stuff probably knows it could go on forever if you let it.
Is there an overall theme to the lyrics and art for Amer? What’s the thinking behind everything being in French?
Mel: I was writing the lyrics for our new EP and I started with the song that is now called “Jour de Souffrance.” I usually do on average one French song per release. While working on “Jour de Souffrance,” I had a lot of fun and really enjoyed playing with words in my mother tongue. Enough that I was like, “Let’s do another one in French!” So I did “Vend du Nord.” I already had some rough lyrics for that one that were in French already. After that song, the idea came sort of naturally to keep going only in French. So I finished all the lyrics in French and kept our interlude instrumental. Later in the process, our not-French bass player wrote a few lines for that interlude, which is now “A Void.” That’s how we ended up with six French songs and one English one. To give the EP a French title was then a logical step. I really liked Amer because it sums up well the lyrics and blends perfectly with the artwork. The artwork and the lyrics have the same slightly depressed mood, if I can say. It is easier to get a coherence when the same person does both. The concept of the cover and back cover is the people standing together looking at a abstract burnt sun. The front cover is half of the image. There is a palpable void and silence between them. A certain despair. It really echoes with the lyrics from the track “Une triste vue” :
” À quel moment sommes-nous devenus misérables?
Le dos courbé, la tête baissée; nous nous regardons à peine.
L’intense vide entre nous deux.
À quel moment sommes-nous devenus si tristes, si misérables?
Était-ce le jour où nous avons tout eu? ”
Tell us about the animated video for “L’enclume et le marteau.” Lay out the who/what/why/how of how it got from idea to execution.
Topon: We got hooked up with this guy Phil Osborne (Osborne Oddities) through my buddy Leigh Newton. Phil had done some really cool animated videos for Leigh’s bands The Sun Through A Telescope and Daiquiri, so that’s where we got the idea to contact him for this project. We gave Phil the lyrics to the song and carte blanche to do whatever he wanted. I remember watching the first draft of the video and thinking “Man, this is really weird. Maybe too weird.” I just wasn’t sure if it was for us, but the more I thought about it, I liked that I was uncomfortable with it. We never wanted to do the typical video where you’re fake playing a song in a dark alley or anything. We want it to be different and not a typical metal band video. Phil is really someone that doesn’t listen to metal or grind at all and he doesn’t know anything about this scene, so his approach is coming from somewhere completely different. When it was done, I went to his place to watch it and talk about it a bunch. It was really cool to hear his perspective and find out where the ideas were coming from. He made 800 different drawings for the video and gave us all of them. We’re going to be putting one or more of the drawings in each copy of the 10″vinyl.
What’s on the horizon for the band?
Topon: We’re leaving for Europe in three weeks for a three week tour. We’ve never been there in the summer before and we’re going to be going to the UK and Spain for the first time as well as playing Obscene Extreme for the first time, so it’s really exciting for us. We have all the music for our next album recorded and Mel is working on the lyrics and vocals now. When we get back from Europe we’ll be recording those and I’ll be mixing three songs that we have left over from the Die Miserable sessions. We’ll also be recording drums for another future release next week, and finish recording that when we get back from Europe as well. Then, it’ll be back to writing and a tour through Eastern Canada in September. It’s hard to slow down when you always have something on your plate, but this band exists because we always have something to finish.
A new track: “Panser la plaie au lieu de soigner le mal”
FUCK THE FACTS 2013 EUROPEAN TOUR
07/01 ITA Milano | Blue Rose Saloon
07/02 CZE Karlovy Vary | Slashbar
07/03 GER Berlin | Koma F
07/04 CZE Trutnov | Obscene Extreme Festival
07/05 HOL Rotterdam | Baroeg
07/06 HOL Nijmegen | Nothing Changed Fest
07/07 UK Brighton | Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar
07/08 UK Leeds | The Fox & Newt
07/09 UK Manchester | Kraak Gallery
07/10 UK Bristol | The Stag and Hounds
07/11 UK London | The Unicorn Camden Live
07/12 BEL Brussels | DNA
07/13 FRA Lille | Le Bistrot de St So
07/14 FRA Toulouse | Pavillons Sauvages
07/15 SPA Bilbao | Sentinel Club
07/16 SPA Logroño | Villatruño Squat
07/17 SPA Zaragoza | Arrebato
07/18 SPA Torellò | Eclectic Club
07/19 SPA Barcelona | TBA
07/20 FRA Luynes | Le Korigan
07/21 ITA Bologna | Freakout Club
Pre-order links:
10″ vinyl & cassette: fuckthefacts.bigcartel.com
digital: fuckthefacts.bandcamp.com/album/amer
