Prior to their show in London recently, I had the chance to have a chat with the bassist from American death metal band Rivers of Nihil. After a warm welcome, we got right down to business…
How’s the tour been so far?
It’s been good! Considering it’s our first time here, we’ve been doing really well and the crowds have been responding positively to us. We’ve toured with Beyond Creation and Revocation in the states before and we’re good friends with them.
How do you feel this year has been for the band?
It’s been a little slow actually. We’ve had a couple of things fall through for us tour wise and as such we haven’t been as busy as we would have liked. Overall though, you take the good with the bad and the tours we have had have been getting better and better.
We’re working on new material right now so we’ve been filling our downtime with that. We’ve got about 35% of the material done but there’s still going to be a lot of changes that will be made prior to us going for recording.
In light of that, have you decided who you would like to produce the next album yet?
It’s going to be a case of who’s available when. We have one guy in mind who would be a huge get for us. The easy answer would always be to do what we did with Monarchy. We recorded that one at Atrium audio in Pennsylvania, which is nearby to where we are based.
What sort of gear do you use live?
Me personally, I use a Darkglass B7K pre-amp pedal as my main source of tone. I’ve been using it for four or five tours now and it sounds great. We normally use a DI rig but on this tour I’ve also been using cabinets in tandem with the DI. There’s some awesome Engl bass heads and cabinets that are sounding awesome up front.
Aside from working on new material, what are the band immediate plans for the future?
After this tour, we have one more show with Beyond Creation in December. That’s like a home town show with them that they do yearly and they invited us along because we’ve toured with them so often recently.
We have potentially some plans to go to Mexico but as of right now it’s a little up in the air. There’s some other ‘lines in the water’ but we’ll see what happens.
Are there any new bands that have peaked your interest in the past 12-18 months?
Not in the last couple of months, but over the past few years I’ve really been enjoying a band called Warforge. They’re from Chicago and they play technical black metal. It’s neat stuff and different from what’s out there.
What advice would you give to a new band?
That’s a tough question! Everybody has different priorities but I think if your goal is to just get out there and play music then don’t make it about anything more than that. If you want to be that band that get’s toured and signed, then be prepared to put a lot of hard work in.
Also observe other bands in the scene and see what they are doing. It’s something that we did early on. Whenever we played shows with bigger bands, we observed how all the flow worked on stage and basically stayed out of everybody’s way!
