Kiss '70s Solo Records Served As Inspiration For Latest Periphery Release

"It was just kind of a fun experiment really. The idea was just, 'Go all out and make any song that you want',” says Periphery guitar wizard Misha Mansoor of Clear; a release that isn't the band's next full-length album – work on that's planned for March/April – nor is it an EP – the band didn't want to repeat themselves having done Icarus back in 2011.

Mansoor doesn't refer to Clear as anything but an 'experiment' because the seven-track release is just that. There's an introductory song that the band did together, and then every other song saw the individual members of the six-piece write whatever they wanted.

Mansoor breaks down how it all came to be: “Stef [Stephen Carpenter] from the Deftones, I guess he's a pretty big fan of our music, and we'd hang out with those guys a lot, but with him especially, and one day when we were on tour together he suggested 'Y'know, you've got a band full of producers, I'd like to hear if you had an idea, how everybody would interpret that one idea'. And that stuck with us. It was a good point, and we started to wonder what that would be like. Then we had a little over a month between the Summer Slaughter tour and a headliner last year, and we realised that not only are we a band full of producers, but that a lot of us have the ability to record at home. So we could put together an idea like this fairly quickly when everybody was just responsible for one song.”

Where that idea diverged from the efforts of bands like KISS and The Melvins was that the person in charge of the song could do whatever they wanted to realise their vision. Where KISS had strict rules that they would not play on each other's records, Periphery decided any member could get whatever musicians they wanted to help them along with the thing, whether they were in the band or not."

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