Survival Strategies

"To be honest, I genuinely don't pay attention to it,” ponders the 36-year-old musician about the band's continuously positive critical adoration. He's had years to get used to it – while their previous output was by no means unworthy, Converge truly turned the world of heavy music on its head with 2001's Jane Doe, an album often seen as a clearly defined rebirth in the band's stunning discography. More specifically, however, he speaks in relation to their eighth and most heavily publicised full-length to date, All We Love We Leave Behind.

“I appreciate the fact that people give our band the time of day, and let our music into their lives in some way,” he continues. “You can't really take it for anything more than that, ever, because everybody's experience with music is subjective and is wholly their own. If we started paying attention to people's opinions of how we make music, what we do, what's valid, what's not, what's good, what's not, we'd cease making music that's honest. To us it's just about putting our heads down, writing music that is fulfilling to us, and sharing it with people. If I allowed it to have weight, then I think we would start making different kinds of music. We would start making music to appease people.”

With that in mind, Bannon continues to explain why a band's latest release should always be their most important – evidently, it seems anniversary tours are for suckers.

“I think we're always the most emotionally in tune with the most recent record we've released. I think that's the way bands should be, because if you're not, you're doing something wrong. I've always felt that it was odd when bands do a tour of like their old hit record or something like that, because that's discrediting the emotional substance, and artistic substance of the records they did after that. For me, I wouldn't want to put out something that was anything less than the record before it.”

Converge has retained the same line-up for well over a decade now, a feat that's relatively unheard of in heavy music. Bannon reveals how much life on the road can make or break a unit in the early days.

“When we were kids, we all had different responsibilities in life – it was sometimes difficult to focus wholly on music. For example, when I was going to college, I was paying for college myself, paying for my apartment, my food, and just my living, and there was those expenses, and it was regimented, so you didn't really have the time and the energy to be able to play in a band at will. You could go on tour for two weeks at a time; otherwise you're locked into a full-time job or full-time school. It wasn't an option. There was no social life, there was no anything for those years. It was just school, work, school, work. You have a lot of pressures from the outside world, whether it be family, friends or just society at large, to participate in a different way.

“We shed a couple of drummers for that reason. We lost the second drummer we ever had, he did one European tour with us, and it essentially broke him. You're basically sleeping two or three hours a night somewhere on the ground in a squat for six weeks at a time, eating whatever food someone's generous enough to give to you. Those are hard tours, and they broke a lot of people. It's a hard lifestyle to romanticise and to maintain. When we were kids, people would want to do it, they'd be excited, they'd want to tour, and it'd be a week or two into a tour and they'd want to die.”

Since bassist Nate Newton and drummer Ben Koller joined Bannon alongside fellow founding guitarist Kurt Ballou around the turn of the century, Converge have held it down as a four-piece. They're the definition of eventual massive success through persisting with a DIY approach. The band handles almost everything internally, with Bannon even putting out the vinyl editions of their releases through his own Deathwish Inc. label.

Hydra Head Records – a label run by a long-time friend of Converge's, Aaron Turner of ISIS – recently announced a gradual shutdown in operations, and the poetic yet savage vocalist has plenty to say on it.

“You should always be concerned with the future of all labels, because that's a huge reality. If Deathwish was smart, were intelligent, rather than releasing music because our heart's in it, we would have closed a long time ago. For the first seven years of our business I didn't get paid a dime, and I still worked full-time. It's a labour of love. It's music and it's a community, and it's us giving ourselves to it because we believe in the power of aggressive music. It's very important for people not to take that for granted.

“The Hydra Head situation, they got tired of being broke, and that's a difficult place, and all small businesses have to deal with that in some way. It's a very different, difficult world to exist in. As labels we have to support our artists, we promote our artists, and to make the world see and experience their music, yet it's usually easier to steal the music than it is to purchase it. We exist in a world where we have to literally convince people that the things we love, that we put our hearts into, is something of value. There's no economy that exists like that.

“It'd be great if everything was that utopian, but it's not. If it was that utopian, where we could exist in a world where people didn't pay for music, but everybody went to shows, then that would mean that every show that every band played there would be thousands of people at it, and it would be a joyous and positive experience, and everything would be happy to pay their fucking eight to fifteen dollars to get into a show, and would be very helpful, and very enthusiastic.

“In reality you get people who complain about door prices for shows, you get promoters who try to screw over bands, you have people that try to steal merch from bands, you have venues that try to take a merch percentage from bands, where that's really the only source of income, because the expense of just being there is so much. You have to constantly worry about your gear being stolen, vehicles get stolen, things get broken into. You can go pay for gas at a gas pump with a credit or debit card and you can lose all your fucking money, because someone hacked the little computer that's in there. That's the world we live in. That's not like a reality where people download records and then everyone goes to a show and everyone lives happily ever after.”

Converge will be playing the following shows:

Tuesday 12 February - Amplifier, Perth WA
Wednesday 13 February - Fowlers, Adelaide SA
Friday 15 February - Billboard, Melbourne VIC
Saturday 16 February - Manning Bar, Sydney NSW
Sunday 17 February - The Hi-Fi, Brisbane QLD