Pseudo/Sentai interview on occasion of new release

Greg Murphy This is certainly not intentional. We are really trying to write fun and engaging rock songs but they will often accidentally spin out of control. Scott and I were going through a good bit of Mars Volta, Mr Bungle, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum when we were in the early and middle stages of writing this album, but I don't know if we consider ourselves good enough musicians to think what we are doing is very "avant." The idea of writing music with zero boundaries, zero expectations, and doing whatever feels right for expression might end up creating that sort of sound without the attempt. Accidents usually create the most amazing music.

But to also say it's a shift towards avant-prog, if you listen to our first album (excusing the horrible mixing job) "Scrapes of an Enigmatic Nature" there's plenty of noticeably "weird" tendencies on that album in the vein of the Residents, etc. We hadn't really even listened to the Residents much at that point. Sometimes just completely letting go of all inhibition and just making stuff creates the strangest things. It wasn't about what even sounded good. It was about doing what we wanted to do no matter what.

I'm not sure there was a particular band. I think the mellotron has this wonderful sound to it, and it is cheaper to use than it is to hire a session violist and violinist. I also always loved the idea of using older sounds within a modern context, to show that there are still interesting combinations of notes available. The idea of "throwback" music and sounds doesn't always have to be regressive. Just look at In Lingua Mortua (a band I discovered after this album was recorded.) They mix blackened death metal and 70's prog/fusion about as good as anybody.

I think I was on board with those sounds too because he loves the Beatles so much. We always want to keep that pop songwriting aspect within the music.

We pretty much cycled through amps until we got a solid sound. That Fender Deville 4x10 really has a solid screeching distortion for leads- it's the amp I usually use live, and we recorded the whole album except backup vocals in a nice high quality studio called Menegroth, Thousand Caves. I couldn't even tell you all the details of equipment used. All sorts of ridiculous analog compressors and equalizers as well as digital ones. I'm more of a composer than I am an engineer, which is why we put a LOT of trust into our engineer when it came to tones and equalizing everything. Oh, looks like that runs into the next question.

Colin Marston from all those crazy progressive extreme metal bands like Gorguts/Dysrhythmia.. Colin is one of the most intelligent, talented, humble, amazing people I will probably ever have the pleasure of working with. He understood that with this album we wanted a more 'timeless' sound and mastering job. Something that isn't over compressed and has varying dynamics but something that still sounds loud. There are few people I could have trusted to really understand how to mix something so layered but considering we are not even close to the craziest band he has worked with, it was good to trust him!

Yes! This was actually the first album we were working on together. We started writing some of it in late 2008. Thing is, when it came to record it, none of what we were capable of doing on our own seemed to work. We didn't even have a drummer, bassist, keyboardist, etc. We realized that we needed to shelf this album because it held such high importance to us. We decided to change our moniker to "Patient's Worth" to get some of our weird ideas out there. This helped, and slowly but surely we focused ourselves and reigned our weirdness in to the more refined ideas that were in our original songs. Then, there were some band separations happening and a bit of moving across the country along with transcribing all the songs into sheet music. There's also a matter of financial issues but no need to divulge those!

We always had electronic influence on music. I wouldn't say that those influences came from any particular groups or bands that we listen to. Certainly the shift that Radiohead made from Ok Computer all the way to Hail to the Thief certainly had implications in music. We didn't want to make those types of shifts from album to album though. We want all things to be fully integrated into the sound while still sounding very distinctly like us.

I would say that listens to a good bit of Justice and I listen to a good bit of Air when writing some of this stuff early on.