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 Thanks for taking the time to do this; I’m a huge fan of the band.
No sweat.
For those unfamiliar with Discordance Axis, who was in the final lineup?
Jon Chang on vocals, Dave Witte on drums, Steve Procopio on guitar and Rob Marton on guitar. Steve filled in for a tour when Rob quit in 97 and then when Rob's health gave out in 2001 and forced him out of
the music biz.
With nearly every release by Discordance Axis out of print, sans the corrupted/324 split and The Inalienable Dreamless full length, is there any chance Hydreahead
would pick up the rights to release Jouhou or Ulterior? Also, was Ulterior released on CD or LP only?
We can hope it all comes back into print but odds are, the old stuff is going to stay buried. Mostly stemming from licensing cost negotiation failure between HH and Devour...
that is, they can't agree on a price tag. However we don't frown upon, and in fact encourage, all of our stuff to be traded as mp3's online. One day we'll print the lyrics up and
put them online so you won't need any of the original copies anymore.
There's a complete discography list on the DAX site which will be also available on the upcoming DVD (which has a few
surprises of its own if you are enterprising enough to look for them).
As far as the older days of DAX, I’ve heard Jouhou and several tracks off of Ulterior. As time passed by it seems as if Discordance Axis kept getting faster, and more developed as far as musical structure is
concerned. How can such a thing occur when a band had a revolving door lineup?
Well actually everything we wrote and recorded, except the Necropolitan 7" is me, Dave and Rob (and Rob wrote both "Drowned" and "Leaden Stride"). It also happened over 9 turbulent years haha
There's so many stories of back and forth trying to figure out where to go next... in the end I think a lot of it stems from Rob Marton's writing. It really got us all going. We are
all very distinctive people and there's a lot of all of us in the material, much more so as we got comfortable playing together. At first we started out writing songs by charting
parts. It got way beyond that later haha
There was also a shift from being improvised to being structured around stuff Rob would bring to the table already written. Both ways were fun to work though and I still like
material from throughout the band's history.
Man, CBGBs is like a walk-in urinal. Look at that place...
In the history of Discordance Axis the live shows seemed few and far between, except for Japan. Was it that you weren't well received in the USA, or was it just that you were more popular overseas?
We started off better in Japan because no one in the States was interested in fast music whereas in Japan, all the insane fast grind stuff was exploding. Lots of new bands filled with
energy and playing really fast all the time. Multiplex, Satanic Hell Slaughter, SOB, Melt Banana, Gore Beyond Necropsy, Gibbed, Def Master, Senseless Apocalypse, etc. During
those days, just about every CD I bought was from Japan. We sold a lot of records over there and people really "got" it.
Conversely in the West all the bands started to use triggers and other studio cheats to make themselves sound "better". The whole power violence thing was also exploding
and boring people were pushing 1-3 seconds of fast parts surrounded by cookie cutter mosh stuff. It was a real depressing time to be a fan of "extreme music".
I remember a review from MRR that said something along the lines of, "This record shows you don't have to play fast all the time to be aggressive." It was referring to Carcass LP
number 3 or as I like to call it..."I can't believe this is the fucking follow up to Symphonies of Sickness". I never bought MRR again. Extreme music is supposed to be
extreme. Extremely fast (World), extremely slow (Corrupted), extremely noisy (Merzbow), etc. There will always be great thrash bands like early Capitalist Casualties
or Posion Idea but for the most part when I think of extreme music I'm thinking Repulsion "Horrified", Napalm Death "Peel Sessions 1+2", A.C. "Another Ep", The
GeroGerigegege "Tokyo Anal Dynamite", Controlled Bleeding "Dying and Relieving", Borbetomagus "Buncha Hair That Long", etc.
Hell, look at AC during those years! No tricks up their sleeves. Just 3 guys going for it. They were "the shit" in those days. They toured like crazy and got no recognition till
they landed on Earache. It seems that even the underground is very "brand conscious". Enough ranting though.
I remember hearing Rob had to quit and then briefly after it was announced that Discordance Axis was going to split up. After seeing the biography on the website, I told myself this breakup was a temporary
thing. Has Rob's condition improved in any way? Could Dave Witte get time off from Burnt By the Sun for an occasional show?
Rob's condition hasn't changed. He's still extremely sensitive to loud sounds and besides... of everyone in the band, he hated playing live the most! hahaha
I personally wouldn't be averse to doing a show in a few years if Rob got better but I'm not holding my breath. I think we all enjoyed writing the most anyway and gearing
up for shows took a lot of time that none of us really have...
This pic was taken right before the drummer spontaneously combusted, Spinal Tap-style.
We would practice 2-3 times a week for up to 3-4 months before a show, doing the set 2-3 times per session. It really wore us down. It's a physically tough set to play in the first
place, and playing it over and over so we could just get on stage and storm through it as fast as possible with as few breaks as possible... well I grew to really hate a lot of our songs during those periods!
The Inalienable Dreamless is without question one of the best-packaged releases I've ever seen. To my knowledge it was the first music CD packaged in a DVD case for sale. Who designed this intricate packaging?
Me. I always liked the large scale that the LP format affords to prepare design and images, so I thought... well why not use a DVD?! The book will be bigger and it will be pretty
unique. HH liked the idea so we ran with it. Actually I think it was more of a question of me doing everything and then sending it to them and hoping they would greenlight it haha Luckily they did.
Now for the musical aspect of The Inalienable Dreamless... I think it is one of the greatest moments for any band from NJ, let alone ever. What bands influenced this final masterpiece?
The greatest moment from NJ has got to be Adrenalin OD "Phat n Old" CD. Have you heard it? It's friggin awesome haha but thanks!
As for influences... I know Rob wrote a lot of the guitar while watching Discovery Channel type specials on fighter jets. I was inspired by an anime series called Neon Genesis
Evangelion, which made a lot of very personal inferences about the author's life...which I found to be very compelling. When I sat down to write the stuff for TID, I had that in
mind. Something very intimate, like a journal (though I have never kept one). It's why the type is all handwritten...
Dave is Dave. I have no idea what makes him tick haha
Lyrically speaking, TID is one of the finest written albums I've had the luck to own. Drowned is the standout track on the cd in my opinion. The lyrics are
unreal. I think "There is no current, just a stangnance. These lungs would rather burst then spare me breath" is extremely profound and powerful. Also, on the back
of the packaging it states "I will live forever, alone". What influenced this rather grim and dark viewpoint on the cd?
I think a general concept in terms of the design was to show a "pleasant" scene on the outside, then frame the destroyed components hidden behind it and present them
as "art" (songs) if that makes any sense.
The whole CD has a lot of my personal life in it. I could go into all kinds of explicit detail but I think the work stands on its own without further exposition from me.
And this is right after... which explains the red cloud.
Fucker was full of Kool Aid!
The cover of the disc is very minimal yet massive. Is there any particular artwork, or album covers that gave the idea for this?
It is a semi-common image in anime to show a lone hero set against a large horizon. In the case of TID I didn't want there to be a hero... err I may be getting really esoteric here haha
Back in the early days of Discordance Axis did you ever imagine that you would attain such a cult following?
Actually, all I thought about during the early years of DA was how could we dump all the slow parts and go full blast all the time haha
There's no denying it's nice to see that the work had an effect on people. Hopefully our individual future works will be able to reach people in new ways and if we're really lucky
inspire some other gifted people to make something distinct of their own.
The layout on TID has quite a bit of Japanese Kanji. What is with the Japanese culture obsession?
I've heard people say this before and I'm not sure why, since there is exactly 5 characters in the entire layout. Five characters doesn't necessarily imply an "obsession" to me,
though there's no denying I'm a big fan of Japan.
Ever since I was 5-6 I've been an anime fan (Gatchaman and Space Cruiser Yamato). Back then it was very underground...lots of tape trading...hunting down rare videos burned from laser discs...subtitles were a dream
back then. It was all Japanese or nothing haha. And the stuff was expensive. I would save and scrape for weeks to afford the $20+ bootleg tapes and even more expensive art books. Ahh nostalgia...
As for the band, there are quite a few references to anime spread throughout all of our material... but then again there's all kinds of other stuff too. Video games, board
games, books, movies, etc. Shakespeare used to make allusions all the time in his writing. If it's good enough for Mister S...
Well I have no more questions so if you have any projects you'd care to plug, do so.
Dave is in a lot of other projects. More than I've got fingers and toes. Rob spends most of his time programming these days. It's very hush hush I've been told...
“My head hurts, my feet stink, and I don’t love Jesus.”
I'm focusing on creating original animation series and films. My main project now is an OVA called Scratch Trigger Era that I wrote and am designing/animating with a friend of
mine named Mark Gilson. New projects are always mentioned on studio-grey.com.
Steve is dividing his time between whatever work, his PS2 and composition I think.
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Related Links:
The Official Discordance Axis Site
Hydrahead Records
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