World Domination

Melbourne prog metal six-piece Ne Obliviscaris are currently gearing up for a huge world tour to promote their second album Citadel, the highly-anticipated follow-up to their 2012 debut Portal Of I. But before that can happen, lead singer and violinist Tim Charles has a bit of work to do to pay back some of the contributors of their crowdfunding campaign that made it happen. “I have a couple of violin solos I’ve got to record. I’ve got to do one next week actually cause there’s an Italian band that’s paid us the $500 reward to get one of us to do a solo on their album and so we had a couple of people choose those things.”

In what’s now the most successful crowdfunding campaign in Australian history, the band managed to raise over $80,000 in a 60-day Pozible campaign, making over double their targeted amount and breaking the Australian record for music-related crowdfunding by more than $25,000. Charles says the idea for the campaign came about right before the band entered the studio to record Citadel at the end of 2013. “Doing a world tour crowdfunding campaign was a little bit risky and ambitious just because there weren’t a lot of similar campaigns to study. I only found a couple other bands with campaigns that were in any way similar and I guess that’s because crowdfunding is fairly new and most people are doing it for their records so to do something like this where we were guaranteeing people tours hadn’t really been done before this way.”

In addition to Europe, UK, North America and Asia, the band has used the additional pledge money to add more dates to the tour. “We’ve been trying to see where else we could go and how far we could stretch the money to get to as many countries as possible. One of the additions we managed to add in is Israel, which is really exciting for us to be able to play to fans because it’s somewhere I’d never thought we’d get to go to.”

The band will kick off a run of shows in Australia starting in Launceston on 8 Nov and continuing all the way until Soundwave next year in March before tackling the rest of the world. According to Charles, the new material should gel well with the rest of their material in their live shows. “I think all the songs are going to work really well live. We always jam the songs a lot as a band and that gives a good vibe of how things will come across in the live atmosphere. We’re getting all the new stuff up to scratch so we can do a completely new set for this tour and we’re really excited to have the amazing Beyond Creation from Canada to support us as well as playing some of the biggest venues we’ve played and it’s looking like it’s going to be the biggest headline tour we’ve ever done in Australia so we’re definitely very excited.”