Interviews : Tim Charles (Ne Obliviscaris)

I’m not even sure whether there’s any need to write an introductory paragraph for this, but if you somehow managed to miss the news; Melbourne’s Ne Obliviscaris have finally, after far too long, released their debut album Portal of I. Judging from the feedback floating around, the general consensus is that is was certainly worth the wait. With live shows kicking off this weekend (dates at the bottom), we thought it was time to ask violinist and vocalist Tim Charles about the back-story and what the band’s future plans are.

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This album has been a long time coming, with several delays. For those who couldn’t quite keep up with the rather eventful process, why did the album take such a long time to complete?

The album took this long for a variety of reasons. We released our demo ‘The Aurora Veil’ in April, 2007 with the plan to re-record those songs and several others at the end of that year for a 2008 album release. That original plan was derailed when we parted ways with our original lead guitarist in mid 2007. That then led to a 9 month search for a new lead guitarist that landed us the incredible Benjamin Baret who arrived in Australia in mid 2008. By that stage we had more than enough material for the album, and so the plan was to play a few comeback shows and then record the album straight away. We were trying to get things happening with a certain producer in Australia, but it was difficult to fit in with his schedule and after a couple months trying we abandoned that plan and decided to seek out different studios/producers. When we came to the decision we were going to record at Pony Music with Troy McCosker & have it mixed with Jens Bogren in Sweden we then had to wait until mid 2009 to see if the government grant we applied for was successful as otherwise we couldn’t afford to pay for that team to handle the album.
When our government grant was successful we then booked in to the studio for the summer of 09/10 with plans for it to be released in the first half of 2010. All was going according to plan and we had recorded all drums, bass, rhythm guitars and most of the leads when I had a family emergency that resulted in us having to cancel the remaining dates (we were only around 2-3 weeks from the album being fully recorded at that stage), and because the studio was quite busy at that time we couldn’t get new dates to finish the album for several months. We then had several personal life things get in the way, some big like family members dying, and some minor like Marc & I both getting the flu which pushed back some vocal sessions twice. Then when we finally were getting close to the album being done, our lead guitarist Benji’s new Australian visa got denied and was he consequently stuck in France, where he stayed for the next 15 months whilst we appealed the unjust decision.

During this time we continued to finish off the record, finalise vocals/violins & move on to mixing/mastering but without great urgency as we knew that we didn’t want to release it until we if were getting Benji back as we knew it would be very difficult to get the faith of a record label when we knew that if we couldn’t get him back we weren’t sure what the future for the band would hold. Plus at this stage in 2011 we knew that our drummer Dan was likely going to move on to other things, and so we had that issue to contend with as well.

FINALLY, in late 2011 we got notification that we won our appeal, Benji arrived here in Australia just before Christmas at which stage we started rehearsing with our new drummer Nelson Barnes who also plays in the amazing ‘The Schoenberg Automaton‘. With a full band in place once again we then started putting everything into place to release the album and here we are!

I gather you’re happy with the way things have turned out?

Absolutely. I don’t think we could have done any better for our first album. We learned so much from the process and are very proud of what we are presenting to the public with ‘Portal Of I’.

One big difference I have noticed between the new album and The Aurora Veil is how much deeper and more dynamic your vocals are. Is that something you have been focusing on developing for the album?

First of all, thanks very much for the kind words. It’s definitely something that I focused on for sure. When I first joined NeO I was only the violinist, not a singer in the band also, and so this has definitely been a role I have slowly grown into over time. I definitely feel that my vocal performances on the album are far superior to what we did on the demo, so it’s always nice when others agree.

Obviously the EP tracks are fairly old, and you have been playing Xenoflux and And Plague Flowers The Kaleidescope live for some time now. Over the years, in what order (roughly, obviously there would be overlaps) were the songs written in?

Hmmm, roughly the 3 TAV tracks & ‘Butterflies’ were written approx 2006. Plague & Xenoflux were both written in 2007/2008 whilst we were trying to find a new lead guitarist and then we finished them in the 2nd half of 2008 when Benji finally moved to Australia to join the band. ‘Of Petrichor Weaves Black Noise’ was then written in mid 2009 and finished shortly before we started recording. This song wasn’t originally going to be on the album as we had already started pre-production when we started writing this, but then as it started to come together we all just fell in love with it and added it in at the last second. We actually then continued writing and were close to finishing a couple songs for album #2 back in 2010, but when Benji ended up stuck in France all writing ceased for a while. We’re all really excited about starting writing the next album very soon as we have so many ideas and parts of songs that we’ve been sitting on for the last couple of years that we haven’t had the chance to develop yet.

Did your new-ish drummer Nelson Barnes make any changes or was everything already set in place by that time? And how does his playing style compare to Dan Presland’s?

Nelson came on board after the album had been fully completed, so all credit for the drums on the album goes to Dan who did an amazing job. Nelson
has been doing a great job thus far and we’re really excited to have him in the band. As for playing style… I’d just encourage people to come see us play live and see for themselves!

We have probably a full album worth of older material that didn’t make the cut, most of which we stopped playing live many years ago. Songs like ‘Upon The Tongue Of Eloquence’ & ‘When The Black Hands Dance’ were early live favourite when we first hit the scene, but we definitely feel that it wasn’t until we wrote ‘The Aurora Veil’ material that we really came into our own. We did start writing several other newer songs, but in general if we aren’t being blown away by a new song generally it just never gets finished and we had a couple songs like that which we got 80-90% finished and then we weren’t quite happy and ended up tossing them away and maybe using the riffs elsewhere or storing them away for album #2.

Do you have a personal favourite track on the album?

It is a bit like trying to choose between your children as I really love every song as they all are quite different, but if I had to choose one it probably be ‘Of Petrichor Weaves Black Noise’. But if you asked those that know me well they’d probably tell you our newest song is almost always my favourite..haha

What’s the plan for the rest of the year?

Tour! We’re really excited about finally getting out and playing some shows, and then we’ll also be spending a lot of time promoting the release, doing interviews, and hopefully starting work on getting some overseas tours happening for 2013.

Last words?

Thank you so much to everyone that stuck by us all this time! The only thing that kept this band together through the years of delays was the fact that we knew we had such amazing support from so many people across the world. So many people helped us out with our visa appeal, and we wanted to ensure we thanked everyone by doing the best we could with this album. Thanks again, go buy the album if you haven’t already and see you all on tour!

You can purchase the new Ne Obliviscaris album over at their Bigcartel page, and catch the band live on the following dates.