To start the interview, would you be nice enough to introduce your band with a short history ?
Hi! Textures was born in 2001, the start was made by a collaboration between me (Jochem) and Stef. After a while we were with 6 energetics, eager to make music. We built a studio ourselves and started recording... after 1,5 years all was done and "polars" was conceived! We got a lot of success since then! really cool! Textures is: Eric Kalsbeek vocals - Dennis Aarts bass - Jochem Jacobs guitars vocals - Stef Broks drums - Richard Rietdijk synths - Bart Hennephof guitars
Your brand new cd "Polars" is just released. Can you tell us more about it, the recordings, the songs etc ?
We were lucky because we were able to do everything ourselves, from the songwriting and entire production to the artwork. We didn't have a lot of money, but we bought some gear with the money we had. Once we composed most of the music, we started to plan and arrange things. Everybody did their part and the whole idea slowly came together. We couldn't get anywhere without 200 procent dedication: a professional approach is really time-consuming, you have to accept that when doing such a thing. And thats just the start of it. Cause then you have to fill in that time. I studied composition and music technology and Richard has done audio engineering. Together we set the entire thing up and went all the way! We built our own studio, started recording and mixed and mastered it afterwards. Of course a large amount of pre-production had been done beforehand: you have to know what you want, and how you can achieve that. What was important to us was maintaining the interaction of playing together. Of course we started with recording drums, but with the entire band playing along over headphones. After that Guitars, bass, synths and vocals. As in many metal productions (being in an imaginary soundfield, so not a totally real sound, but no broken reality either) there's the same approach as with a pop production, so a lot of close micing, to make placing everything in it's own space in the mix easier later on. So it's about keeping control all the way to the end. We chose to record using Pro Tools for it's speed and ease of use. We mixed Polars down analogue (mackie 8 bus 32 channel) in Jochem's studio from Logic using a hybrid from of hard- and software. For projects as large as this it seems difficult to maintain a time-schedule. It certainly took us longer than we anticipated beforehand.
We can find a lot of different influences in your first releases, from Meshugah to Devin Townsend, am I wrong ?Who would you classify as your band 's main influences ?
We all listen to a wide variety of music, from classical music to fusion, metal and sing-songwriters. In every style of music there are beautiful things ready to be discovered. Everybody has got their own dynamic package of stuff they listen to and within the band, at some point, we meet eachother and that's where we try to do our thing!