Dreaming Of Electric Sheep

"I totally understand, we can come across as pretty clinical at times,” The Amenta's founding member and keyboard player Timothy Pope concedes.

Maybe it has something to do with the band's notorious live show – one that has seen them inhabit the stage of tiny clubs where a smoke machine on overdrive has partially obscured the crowd's vision and they come out on stage with faces painted a steely black to obscure any facial expression and matching military-style shirts – but The Amenta certainly don't come across as warm or particularly human. In the past, when The Amenta has been wrenching out blast beats, gut-busting riffs and layers of ambience, all precisely layered atop one another, they have seemed more like Blade Runner jacked up on nuke, the synthetic drug from Robocop 2, than any expression of humanity.

But according to Pope, that's not what The Amenta set out to be about. They never had aspirations to write dispassionate, Kraftwerk-turns-extreme-metal type stuff. It was more something they kind of fell into, as well as a reaction to their heavily black metal-influenced debut, Occasus.

“Though we sometimes seem clinical, I think we quite often get unfairly pigeonholed as a cold act. I think a lot of that had more to do with production rather than actual songwriting, especially with this album; lyrically, it's more about a personal, human struggle. And I think the mix on this album is the first time we've got something that's sympathetic to that human element in the music. I think it's warmer and more bass-driven, where n0n came out a lot harsher.”

The band's latest record, Flesh Is Heir, sounds more in line with Pope's vision of the idealised version of The Amenta. It rejects the bleak, programmed sound of n0n for a thrashy assault that comes on abrupt, ugly and charged with spontaneity. Likewise, their second effort's lyrical focus on societal decay is swapped for a much more personal approach.

“All of our albums are kind of a reaction to our previous albums. Especially with n0n, which was before Flesh Is Heir; it was really hard work. And there was a big emotional investment, as well as time. So at the end we were really burnt out, and the idea of writing anything became really off-putting after that whole experience. So the first thing we do when we write a new album is to experiment and explore and find a new direction so we won't feel that burnt out. Where the second album was really electronic, programmed and quite dense, there were a lot of meticulous little changes throughout it, so with this one we wanted to get something more immediate. So the thing that inspired us to write Flesh Is Heir, and what really shaped the record was that we tried to work really quickly. We threw down ideas and if we felt they had magic then we left them as they were. I think we ended up with something a bit more organic.”

Having put the record out, Pope and his bandmates have now turned their attention to playing a national run of shows to support Flesh Is Heir and combining material off the new record with the varying sounds of their two previous full-lengths, as well as EPs like VO1D and Chokehold, into a setlist. According to Pope, the divergent directions of the band's releases still fit together rather nicely when it's time to do it live.

“The way we approach a setlist is exactly the same way we'd approach an album tracklist; there's got to be movements and flow; you can't just get out there and blast beat from beginning to end and expect people to care. Obviously they'll get bored, so you need to kind of play with people's energy. We might start with something that's a little more open and epic to draw people in, then go into something that's faster and uglier and stranger… You can kind of push and pull people's ears a little bit, and I think that tends to keep people interested. Because I think, and I think this for everything we do, there should be room for the audience to breathe, as well as times when it's completely claustrophobic.”

As for what else fans can expect from the band's Flesh Is Heir tour, Pope assures that there'll be plenty of atmospheric extras that should add to any feelings of claustrophobia crowds might experience. Even if they've evolved musically, these are still the guys who used to paint their faces and freak out in front of a strobe light flurry, and their show will always be an engaging spectacle.

“We've got a long-term crew member who's considered part of the band nowadays. He doesn't record anything, but we call him our audio/visual producer and he does all the lighting and films all of our shows – we try to record everything we play so there's content there. Because we'd like to do more stuff like VO1D where we can give bonus stuff out to fans for free over the internet – but for this tour we've got lasers, our trusty smoke machine and strobe lights. Plus we've got Cain, who's kind of like the mad scientist of frontmanship, so he's going to be thinking up ideas, and I'm sure he'll be extraordinarily creepy when he gets onstage.”

If, over the years, The Amenta's live show has been anything, then Pope's assertion of its 'creepiness' is certainly on the money. The dissociated, abrasive element to their performance even has a lot to do with the perception of the band as a clinical entity rather than the output of a collective of humans. And even as Flesh Is Heir introduces a more personal element to their catalogue, Pope is pretty confident that fans won't be seeing a version of The Amenta that comes across as any less creepy.

“Our aim when we go onstage is to represent the music honestly. Obviously we're not the type of people in real life that we portray on stage, but I think the music is an aspect of us which gets amplified when we get on stage. So in a way it's performance, but also it's trying to find a way to inhabit them.

“I think most people aren't honest about their music. People who make really extreme music and then get up on stage and they have that ironic smirk on their face and they're dressed like they're going down to the shops to get milk, I don't think that's honest. Even though that's them, and they're representing themselves up on stage, they're not honestly representing the music. So what we're trying to do is to make ugly and extreme music, and then be ugly and extreme people on stage, because that's what it deserves. But we don't structure anything; we just get up there and do what we do. We're never saying, 'Oh Cain, when I do this, you go and drool on somebody's face.' It just kind of happens.”