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Assemblage 23
Assemblage 23 have just started the European leg of their Storm tour and Moving Hands decided to have a word with Tom Shear.
Assemblage 23 have just started the European leg of their Storm tour, a tour that is a lot shorter than their Defiance tour that visited Europe in 2002. This is due to the fact that everybody thought the last tour was too long, and the morale was low since everybody missed their homes and families. The reason that the tour doesn’t visit Scandinavia this time was the the extra costs of getting the bus over there that made the fee too high for the promoters. The tour is in support of the new album, Storm, and Moving Hands decided to have a talk with Tom Shear, the man behind Assemblage 23, about the new album and about Assemblage 23 in general.
The new album "Storm" is an attempt at building on the foundation of what has been done with Assemblage 23 in the past. Most of the elements that make Assemblage 23 identifiable as Assemblage 23
are there, but in a much more complex, layered way. This makes the songs more developed and detailed than anything that Tom has released before. The album contains mostly up tempo club oriented tracks, which wasn’t the initial intention, but just the way the songs turned out. Tom tells us that he doesn’t have an idea for how the album will sound when starting to work on it, but it develops as time passes, and in this case he was just in the mood to do something really energetic and upbeat.
The vocals have always been a thing that sets Assemblage 23 aside from a lot of other “Future Pop” bands, since Tom usually writes very personal lyrics, dealing with issues important to him in a honest way. This might seem odd, since Tom hates writing lyrics since he finds the process really difficult. This in turn means that he writes the music first, and that the lyrics get added in the later stages of song development. Tom’s vocals have also improved a lot since the first releases, this being due to him using his voice a lot more, and having learned the limitations of his voice, and what he can and can’t do as a vocalist. He really hates AutoTune and other technological aids, and feels that if you want a slick and professional result you should work hard to achieve it. Tom contributed his vocals to the Parallel Fusion track Explicit and says that it’s something he could do again, if asked. On the other hand he feels that Assemblage 23 is too much of a personal project for him to use a guest vocalist on an Assemblage 23 track.
The album is accompanied by two singles, “Let the wind erase me” and “Ground”. These try on a new format, where instead of containing the remixes most of the singles released to day do, they contain versions of the single track, all written by Tom and with the vocal rerecorded to fit each version. Tom is very happy with how this worked out, and its something he’ll want to do more of in the future. This in turn means that there wont be the same amount of Assemblage 23 tracks mixed by other people, but Tom feels that people get overloaded with remixes as it is. The two singles also contain two exclusive tracks, that were made for the album but that got left out since Tom didn’t feel that they fitted the theme of “Storm”. While on the subject of remixes Tom tells us that he’d like to remix some more mainstream music, he thinks he could learn a lot from just listening to the individual elements and production techniques.
The one track that stands out on "Storm" and that doesn’t feel like a typical Assemblage 23 track is the slow and moody 30kft. The song came about while watching a documentary on plane crashes where one of the things they were talking about is how cell phones and satellite phones had given insights to crash investigators because sometimes the passengers would attempt to call loved ones to say goodbye before the crash. They played some answering machine messages people had left and it was really moving. Since Tom fly quite a bit, it really struck him. Ironically, the lyrics were written on a plane!
Tom wants to finish off the interview by thanking all our readers for the support, which means more to him then you’ll ever know, and he also hopes to visit Scandinavia again soon, perhaps for a festival show the next summer!
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