Interview: Earthton9
It ended up not being a particularly mutual thing and it sucks to be honest with you. We've had long friendships and we've had lives and careers and lots of stuff together but we were thinking about this in terms of creativity and writing some stuff that we were all proud of and we just weren't on the same page.
I was given 40 minutes (thanks Zoom) to speak to an absolute legend of the UK scene, the person who gave me the life aim of growing my own beard, the voice which has rumbled and caressed through tape players, CD players, mini disc players, MP3 players, phones, headphones, earphones, earbuds, bluetooth speakers…and still to this day is one of the greatest vocalists from these shores. Here is just some of what I put in front of Mr Karl Middleton of Earthtone9 to discuss the brand new album In Resonance Nexus, the prospect of new Twinzero material, the second Earthtone9 split up, what the band will be up to at ArcTanGent Festival and future musical releases. Thank you to Lisa at Hold Tight PR for making a dream reality (for the interview, I managed to grow the beard thanks to some strong family genes).
E&D: The first break up has been well covered but I would like to talk about the second one a couple of years ago. There was an announcement that the band would be cancelling ArcTanGent and any other upcoming gigs and the band was over again. It seemed rather final when I read it but here you are with a new album ready to go only two years after that. What were the circumstances at the time that caused the band to split up?
Karl: It just felt like we’d run out of road in terms of Simon (Hutchby, drums) and Owen (Packard, guitars) being able to write together and just being on the same musical page. Then we kicked around a bunch of stuff, do we just play shows together where we’re just focusing on what Earthtone9 was or try to find common musical ground. I had been away for about five years and there had been bunches of writing sessions but it just felt like a law of diminishing returns in terms of the musical overlap where there was stuff that was enjoyable to them. That had sort of been cooking away in the background and because ArcTanGent had been cancelled in 2020 and 2021, when it came time to make some decisions and start preparing to put on a good show there just wasn’t the appetite to do it for a variety of reasons. It had been in the books for two years and it’s just an uncool thing to do but the choice was either cancel or I did it with a bunch of friends, which seemed kind of lame and just fulfilling a contract with it not really being the key people in the band. So yeah, the announcement was kind of me throwing my hands up in the air.
E&D: It has been mentioned that In Resonance Nexus was taken from a bank of around 40 songs. Was that just from writing from 2020 onwards?
Karl: Yeah that’s right. Before that we probably had an album and a half or two albums worth of material that had been written it was kind of in the style of IV but when we reviewed it it felt like it was less strong than IV and like I said it felt like we’d run out of road in terms of that style and what that line-up as it was could create that was exciting for everybody.
E&D: With that difference in opinion with Simon on style, was his departure a mutual thing in the end?
Karl: It ended up not being a particularly mutual thing and it sucks to be honest with you. We’ve had long friendships and we’ve had lives and careers and lots of stuff together but we were thinking about this in terms of creativity and writing some stuff that we were all proud of and we just weren’t on the same page. Simon just doesn’t like really metallic music very much. He’s doing a band at the moment called DethReys which is really great but if you listen to DethReys you’ll fully see where he is as a musician and a player and it’s quite different to this new iteration of Earthtone9. I think oftentimes the core of the music or the bones of the music came from Owen and Simon working together but it just didn’t seem like they could work together and both be excited and happy with the outcomes.
E&D: How long had you been writing again with Joe (Roberts, guitar)?
Karl: I think we were writing together almost from when Covid hit, when there were the series of lockdowns it was something that we were doing. At that point we were thinking we don’t know what this is, we don’t know what it’s for, we just want to write great music and then at some point in the future we’ll work out what it is. After some deliberation Joe, Owen and I concluded that the material sounded like Earthtone9 but with a slightly fresh stance on it. It just felt like an absurdity to be the core songwriting team from Earthtone9 has written a lot of material that sounds like Earthtone9 but maybe with some sort of slightly more aggressive twists and turns, but it’s not going to be called Earthtone9! It felt foolish not to put it out as Earthtone9.
E&D: I certainly agree with that summary of In Resonance Nexus. It is undoubtedly Earthtone9 but sounds like a group of musicians that have been set free without losing any identity. With the writing process did you feel freer to write in different ways?
Karl: Yes, yeah, absolutely. When we did the VI album and the EP before it I think we were just in a different head space. At that point I was listening to more classic rock and so I just wanted to sing, I wanted to do melodic vocals and I wanted to write really catchy top lines and I think we were to some degree all in that space. But you know heavy times make for heavy music and this was kind of where we were. When I think about the totality of what Earthtone’s done this kind of material is much more similar to the heavier end of things that are on Off Kilter Enhancement and on ArcTanGent so it doesn’t really feel like a step away I guess. Maybe some of the pacing and the intensity of the drums and the tempo may be pushed beyond what we’ve done before but if you boil it down to heaviness yeah ‘Approx. Purified’, ‘Serpentine Placement’, ‘Simon Says’ all of those songs are absolutely aligned with what we’ve done on this album.
E&D: It’s a bit of a cliche to say it but it is definitely heavier but I also feel the choruses can be more melodic as well. Some of the work on the clean vocals are possibly the most melodic I have heard from you, did you feel that when you were recording them?
Karl: Yeah, I feel like they’re more melodically interesting and a significant amount of that has to do with Joe being back in the band. He’s a really good singer, he has got a really strong melodic ear and as the band became more melodic in our first phase it was him that was really contributing to a lot of the top lines in terms of their development and in terms of bringing in ideas, he wrote the chorus to ‘Revelation’, he wrote loads of ‘Amnesia’ a lot of ‘House Of Leaves’ was him and on ArcTanGent he came up with half of the choruses that are on the album. So it’s really a product of he and I working together again and this album not being on a very tight timeline, this had room to breathe, it had room for us to iterate to really zone in and say I’m not happy with that bit we can refine it we can we can find something better and then sit until something better comes.
E&D: Is there a central lyrical concept for the album or did you just pick it off song by song?
Karl: There are some reoccurring themes, I mean there’s the same handful of touch points that I always revisit. A lot of it is about change and personal growth, development and transformation in physical, emotional, spiritual. Some of it is social commentary but slightly veiled. The general underpinning for this album was just the extraordinary absurdity that we’ve been a band for 26 years and we haven’t done an album for a decade. The gaps in our work are longer than many bands careers and there’s still a bunch of people that care about what we do, that are interested in what we do and we still want to do it. The idea of In Resonance Nexus is about the resonance between the three of us, the creative resonance and the Nexus being the centre of where this stuff converges to create the music that we believe stands up to anything that’s out there in the metal world. There’s no point of doing this, it’s not like we need to phone it in, we’re not fulfilling any contracts. We’re doing it purely for the love of it because we want to.
E&D: You crowdfunded an EP and the IV album, did that process take you back to that initial DIY phase of the band and did you find it enjoyable or quite stressful?
Karl: Yeah it was both. The main thing about it actually is that it’s really a form of marketing where you’re constantly issuing calls to action, “we’re this way through our fundraising, we need this much more…”, “this is what we’re going to do for you”. It’s this constant update and communication thing which is generally not my lane but it was a powerful and a cool thing to know that there was some hundred people in the world, that on trust, would kick in money to fund something just because our music represented something like a time and a place or a formative period for them. So that you know that was incredible and we really respected it and we were really grateful for it, but yeah it was just like that mechanism of endless updates, endlessly trying to entice or coerce, cagoule folks.
E&D: Was the Candlelight Records deal for In Resonance Nexus based on demos or did you have the final album ready for them to check out?
Karl: We had been sending Darren (Toms, A&R Candlelight Records and Ex-Landmine Spring drummer) demos constantly, so he had heard most of the record but in somewhat embryonic form. They knew where we were going and what it was we wanted to do and they had heard pretty clear demos. Back in the day it used to be a very poorly recorded live recording that you had to really struggle to make out, whereas this is a night and day thing. Home recording on a laptop probably sounds better than half of our earlier albums.
E&D: I just caught the tail end of the first phase of Earthtone9 and I got really into all of your side projects. I have heard there is new material bubbling away but the one I wanted to ask about was Twinzero. I am sure when I bothered him about it 20 years ago Reuben Gotto mentioned there was going to be another album but it hasn’t yet materialised. Is there anything there that could see the light of day?
Karl: He wrote a third album and it was amazing but then it just ran out of steam, I can’t remember why. It might have been that it was so musically sophisticated I just didn’t feel like I could write anything that was good enough for it. But he co-wrote Black Swan Roulette with us, he contributed to that. Yeah we were just trying to pull as many collaborators and kindred spirits in where we could, we must have been sharing and working on that song in 2021 maybe and then it just got parked for a bit. If you like that sort of progressive, mathy metal this “ghost album” is a thing to behold. Maybe I need to call up, yeah he’s busy he works with Lana Del Rey now. That would be a magic thing to revisit, maybe I’ll drop him a message and see if he still got the demos laying around.
E&D: What do you have planned for the ArcTanGent setlist?
Karl: This year we want to tell the world that we’re a current band so we’re gonna play mostly new stuff and then we’ll play a handful of songs that are the songs that we think represent our earlier years that people really want to hear. There’ll probably be a couple of songs missing for some people but we’ve only got 40 or 45 minutes and we’ve got five albums, so tough choices have to be made. I think we’ll probably play about half the new album and then yeah three or four older songs.
E&D: With a bank of 30 odd songs still there are you planning any more releases or just enjoying being back for now?
Karl: I feel like the pace of how we did things in the first phase of the band was great because it kept things quite fresh but we also burnt out a little bit in terms of creativity and just that pace. To try and find a good new middle ground would be awesome where we can enjoy this album and let it breathe but also be working on new material. The songs that aren’t on In Resonance Nexus, it’s not that they weren’t as good as the songs that are, it’s just that they didn’t hang together in a way that we thought was cohesive. I would say 10 of the songs were fighting up until the last minute when thinking about which songs we should be focusing on to develop. There is just finite time, finite sort of bandwidth to do creative work and so we had to pick our battles so to speak and so there are those songs a lot of them are like 75% of the way there and we have already written another three new songs, so it feels exciting to work in this way and and just get the work rate up again. It’s definitely not going to be 11 years until the next record.
