Transcript of an interview I recorded with LUKE FRIZON of GROWTH - 20201207. Full article here. MAL-
Talking to Luke from GROWTH. Luke, thanks for joining me today. LUKE- Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. MAL- It's excellent having you on, we've got a beautiful connection, let's talk about your musical history briefly if we can. LUKE- Absolutely. I've been playing shows for forever. Basically, I think I started playing gigs in probably 2004, doing just metal and hardcore and black metal and all that kind of thing. I think people would probably remember me from the last band I was in was JACK THE STRIPPER, from Melbourne, I was in there for about seven years. So I think anyone who's probably seen me before is most likely in that context of somewhere with involving broken glass and vomit and something else going on with a live show. So following that process once I left that band in 2016 fairly similar time. I just ran into Tristan the guitarist at a bar. It was just like 'hey man, cool shirt'. He's like, 'oh thanks. I was in this band'. The shirt was ZHRINE from Iceland and Tristan had just returned fairly recently from living and working there and playing with those dudes in another band. So we hit it off, they'd already had the better part of this this album sort of written in very atomized fragments, and I also had the narrative lyrically written in the same type of little bits and pieces so we started just put that together over a couple of years. MAL- Yeah, right. Now the the press release I have, it lists 'the debut album with ambitious mental health concept trilogy'. Can you explain to us what that means. LUKE- The idea being that a lot of what we've seen and heard in pop culture, in culture in general when it comes to mental health what we hear a lot about is either the absolute decline, the worst that someone's at, or we hear about their success story or we hear about the tragedy of their loss. We don't really get to learn much about what fills the space between those very distant waypoints. So what we're looking to do with this album and with the subsequent two releases is to illustrate a really clear I guess process of recovery and reconnection with yourself, with the things that you care about, with the things in the universe that you think are great but also really acknowledging and illustrating that that's not an easy thing by any means, it's terrifying. It's really extreme. It's often exhausting and feels very dangerous throughout the entire process because you having to just rewrite or cease beliefs that you've held onto so vitally for your life and at some point, a lot of these behaviors, beliefs, ideas have carried you through the worst of things they might have saved you in the past but these things if they remain as they are can also destroy you and hinder you from getting where you want to be, so we're trying to get a really clear illustration of both path forward and what it might look and feel like, acknowledging that it's going to be extreme. We're looking to do that through just yeah blast beats and really some really visceral stuff. MAL- Very heavy subject, isn't it? LUKE- Absolutely but it's a necessary one. It's a very human subject. MAL- It is a very human subject but it's a subject that not a lot of people want to talk about or when the subject is brought up its avoided and the subject is changed very quickly, but even just the song titles make you think, tell us about some of them. LUKE- Well, let's call up the the the tracklist here. MAL- Cigarette Burns is number one. LUKE- Yeah. Well that kind of came from a two-fold thing. I watch a lot of movies. There was a John Carpenter movie that he made about 15 years ago called 'Cigarette Burns' and it was about a person who chases rare things for people and one of these rare things that he's looking for in this film is a film canister that allegedly contains the slaughtering of an actual Angel, but the reference being that cigarette burns, it's a term used in the old school Cinema when you had film canisters and it was a little tiny mark down at the bottom corner or one of the corners of the screen that would let the projectionists know that they have a very set time limit left to change the film canister before the whole thing just fell apart and wrapped up where it wasn't meant to. That's stuck with me for a long time that illustration and I think there was a point in 2017 I was looking down and realizing that I'd actually covered myself in those burns during a sort of dissociated period where I was very very unwell and was not on the planet by any means, and when I came to realize I've done all these things to myself and thought there's something in this, you know, there's a link, I feel like I'm a I've inadvertently told myself that I've a very limited period of time left to be able to address these things before I fall into a burning heap and start to move towards very permanent things so I really wanted to put that right up top as the first track title because it illustrates that very very valuable point. The final track, 'Gird Your Loved In Armour While Yet You Wither' is a worthy one. It's a worthy title, but I couldn't seem to find a way to express it any more succinctly. It's illustrating the idea that when you have lost your entire self and you don't feel connected to yourself, you feel like somewhere between a collection of ghosts and a rabid dog that needs to be put down. When you reach that terminus, you know, that sort of end point and start justifying yourself only by what you can provide for others, only existing for the sake of obligation, it's a very tragic and painful way to be, and it really is, once your values have shifted towards that, it's the point that there's no real event horizon with these things but it's as close as you can really get because you don't see enough value in the person that you are, the body that you occupy to actually be yourself anymore. So those are the two bookends of it. Yeah in between I think it's so like 'The Treatment For Melancholy' is a little sort of play on words. 'The Treatise Of Melancholy' was one of the first big books released on treating mental health. We're talking hundreds of years ago. It was called the 'The Treatise Of Melancholy'. So I want to take that and put it together with a little limerent false hope love story. Took a very sardonic approach to naming all these things. MAL- Tell us how long this took to get together. Now, you mentioned things were written before you sort of met up, but what did everyone bring to the table? LUKE- The brothers had, I guess, formulated those fragments and they had ideas in their mind of where they think those things could work together, how they could start to coalesce this into that album and I think we really started knuckling down on this one in 2017. I'd just gotten back, I was managing a tour in Japan and I've got back and just got straight into it. I think from that point up until considerably later 2019 pretty much every week at least once a day just hammering away at it and giving it shape. MAL- Tell us about Frederick (Fredrik Nordström mixing/mastering). How did he get into the equation? How did you hook up with him? LUKE- We basically cold-called him. We'd seen the work that he'd done with bands of really high caliber and it was fantastic and we'd seen the amount of care that he put into bands that were just starting out or maybe not at that same level. He recorded and produced some of my favorite albums like 'Still Life' and 'Slaughter Of The Soul' and that kind of thing, Shane from JACK THE STRIPPER had done some work with him in the past and I think maybe Adam as well. So, he got a good character reference off them, which I guess is important because you want to be able to sort of have a sense of trust and connection with the people that you're handing all this precious cargo over to. But yeah, it was very much like, lot of it was done via email because he's all the way up there and we're all the way down here, and that certainly would have only been exacerbated this year, the world got larger all of a sudden, and smaller, but yes, he was fantastic, very professional from the get-go and was very patient with our very eccentric little idiosyncrasies and whatever else that he had to deal with. I think the biggest takeaway that I got from that whole thing was he sent us an email after mixing one of the songs and he's like, 'wow, this is really heavy. I'm going to take a couple of days to clear my head I think, go for a walk or something' and the 15 year old in me went, 'yeah, got him'. That was a very cathartic and enjoyable little moment in amongst all the other moments. MAL- Excellent. Now the album's called 'The Smothering Arms Of Mercy', it's just been released on Wild Thing Records. What's your feedback been so far, apart from Frederick of course? LUKE- Yeah. Oh it's um, it's been amazing. I mean we came into this with zero expectation of how people would take it I guess. We understood that we are speaking to a very, like you said, a very alienating topic that people don't necessarily want to discuss and address and put in the centre of the stage. So really didn't have much of an idea. We had we showed it to a couple of friends and they thought it was great. But to get the kind of feedback we've been getting about it, it seems like people are getting it which is really important and I'm really thrilled about that. It's like it seems like it's making sense to most people which is everything I could have hoped for. MAL- What's the plan now? Are you allowed out over there now and any gigs lined up? What's the story? LUKE- Yeah, so we're getting the gigs thing happening as soon as possible. We were getting the live bands formed and ready together then second lockdown happened over here. So it kind of put us a few months behind and with a lot of these things but we're looking to obviously, we're looking to play shows and tour and everything in the next year, world events permitting. So at this stage the the plan is to really focus on getting that ready. We're going to be getting a bit more, we've got some playthrough videos we want to be doing and that kind of thing to keep showing people more about, I guess what the album's about in the meantime, but yeah, I can't wait to get back on the stage and start getting this stuff out there really. MAL- How do people get hold of this? Some people can't go to shopping centres these days. Where would be the best place for them to get that? LUKE- Well, we've got a website up, simple - 'growthnoise.com'. You should be able to find links to most things from there. We're available on Spotify, YouTube, like all the streaming services that you can shake a stick at, bandcamp as well. We've got a really great set up over at the Wild Thing Records website as well. They've really helped us out and made a lot of accommodations for all of our t-shirts and bits and pieces. So if people are interested absolutely go over there. On YouTube we have a couple of film clips out for this album for 'Cigarette Burns' and for one of my favourite songs 'Soul Rot' on the album. So love to hear people's thoughts on that. But yeah, you can find us where the internet is at the moment pretty much. MAL- This was listed on the press release as the first of a trilogy. So how are we looking? Have we written the other two already? You've probably got a clear direction of where you're going to go with the next two. LUKE- Yeah. Well, the skeleton is together thematically, we've built a really strong backbone to this entire thing about where it's going to go. Tristan's writing process is very sort of, it's a particularly cathartic one. I've never seen anyone write quite like him, and it's like a pressure valve. So when he feels cooped up or cornered that's when he really starts to get these things out and that's a lot of how the first album was written. So this second lock down, everything that's happened this year created the perfect storm in a teacup for him to to get a lot more out, much to his chagrin I think. I don't think he ever wanted to have to do the secluded Bon Iver method ever again, but here we are ,it's got its momentum, you know, it's moving, it's all going to be rolling out over the next couple of years. So you can expect to be hearing a lot more soon, but for the meantime, I would like to give people the chance to really sit with this one because this is the 'collapse and despair' aspect of it, further to that comes the battles of recovery towards triumph. So this one, there's a lot to take in with it and we understand that and we deliberately made it that way because grief and despair are chaotic and nightmarish by nature. So giving people the chance to sit with this one, really marinate in it if they wish, and then yeah onward once the time presents itself. MAL- Hey Luke from GROWTH. Thanks so much for taking the time to have a chat with us today. Best of luck with the album just out. We'll put all the links up on the site and yeah, thanks again for talking. LUKE- Thanks very much. Thanks again for having me and all the best. Comments are closed.
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AuthorMetalhead who hates bad parking. |