COOL VIDEO ALERT: Periphery – Make Total Destroy
Here’s the video for the new Periphery track “Make Total Destroy.” Awesome. It’s from their new album Periphery II: This Time It’s Personal. Hit the link at the top of the column on the right to check the album out.
Check out my interview with the lads here.
INTERVIEW: Periphery’s Misha & Jake
It’s been a year since we checked in with Periphery and in that time the mighty djent machine has grown and evolved at a rapid, startling rate. In the wake of a successful tour with Dream Theater, Periphery’s place as the centrepiece of the djent movement is now firmly established. It’s a genre characterised by heavy syncopated riffs, punchy mid-heavy guitar tones, the use of extended range instruments, clean-to-scream vocals and some of the most outrageous lead guitar work ever committed to hard disc, and Periphery II: This Time It’s Personal builds on the strengths of the band’s self-titled debut in every way. It’s more melodic, yet more extreme. There are more shredding solos but more moments of guitaristic introspection too. More colourful and dramatic. I Heart Guitar caught up with Misha Mansoor and Jake Bowen to talk shop.
Last time we talked, you said you were planning two albums, one of which would be a concept album. Is this still the plan?
Misha: I think we had a lot of expectations, and I guess our gut reaction to that is to just say ‘fuck it’ and do whatever we want. What we’d originally hoped would happen was that we’d get a tonne of time off to just write. We’re at a point where there are so many ideas. All was going to plan but then we got a Dream Theater tour offer smack in the middle of that session. It kinda came to a decision. And no matter what, you never turn down a Dream Theater tour! Continue reading
Periphery announce new album!
Periphery have just announced details of their new album, Periphery II, which features lots of face-melting playing, as well as guest spots from Guthrie Govan, Wes Hauch and John Petrucci. I’ve had the pleasure of listening to the new album and interviewing Misha and Jake about it (to be published closer to the release date) and it’s utterly killer. All the shreddage and great tones we all love but even more melody, more colour, more variety, more depth, more epic modes and scales… just more!
Here’s the press release:
PERIPHERY Announce New Album & Official Track Listing
Combing the complex atypical rhythms and technical precision of math rock with the sensational brutality of progressive metal, PERIPHERY have redefined the boundaries of progressive music.
Guitar Gallery of the Day: Mayones
Today’s guitar gallery is Mayones. They make plenty of great production line guitars – check out the Regius Elements – PERFECT with fretted or fretless neck, Seymour Duncan pickups and GraphTech Ghost System (Piezo preamp + MIDI Hexpander), or this Legend T - but their customs are a step beyond even that, as you’ll see from their gallery here. Check out the Setius PRO 7 Slime pictured above. It has an ash top, mahogany body with open sound chambers (look close and you’ll spot ‘em), cbony freeboard, custom green acrylic Slime inscription and position markers, DiMarzio Evolution (bridge) + PAF 7 (neck) pickups with Green covers, genuine Floyd Rose 7 bridge and Schaller tuners.
Or how about this Setius Dime Bomb XTrem 36? 36 frets, DiMarzio Evolution 7 humbucker (angled for 6 strings)… very cool.
Whoa. Check out Misha’s new Jackson custom
Periphery’s Misha Mansoor just posted this thread on sevenstring.org about his latest Jackson Custom Shop axe. For the full story and plenty of pics, hit the link above. But here’s a snippet.
“Hey guys,
So the wonderful guys at Jackson actually made a twin of my first custom shop guitar just in case something went wrong.
Since that guitar came out great, they asked if there was anything i wanted tweaked, since they could just do it to the twin and send that to me.
The body on the first one was really thick, which led to the guitar sounding huge, but the heel was enormous on it, so i asked if they could make this body thinner and cut the heel down as well for better access, which they did. I also told them to do a blue sparkle finish, but apart from that to keep everything else EXACTLY the same.”
More pics below!
Periphery members cover Slipknot’s ‘The Heretic Anthem’
Under the name of ThoSe FucKing HoRses, members of Periphery have recorded their own version of the Slipknot classic “The Heretic Anthem.” Taylor Larson is on guitars, Will Donnelly is on bass, Misha Mansoor and Matt Helpern are on drums and Spencer Sotelo is on vocals. Check it out!
INTERVIEW: Lamb of God’s Chris Adler
Lamb of God have been around long enough to to be practically considered elder statesmen of modern post-Metallica metal. No, no, it’s true! They formed in 1994, which means they’ve been together for 17 years. That’s five more than The Beatles. Or, to put it in more metallic terms, by the time Metallica were at that point in their career they’d released Kill ‘Em All, Ride The Lightning, Master Of Puppets, …And Justice For All, the Black album, Load and Re-Load. Lamb of God are at the point in their career where they could comfortably settle into a nice rhythm of playing their many classics, maybe throwing in the occasional new song, then going home to watch Letterman. But they’re not like that. With the huge success of Wrath a few years ago, LoG are ready to knock it up a level with Resolution. I spoke with drummer Chris Adler for Mixdown Magazine. The following is an extended version of that interview. I’m sure I Heart Guitar readers won’t mind some percussive insight.
What was the goal for Resolution?
“It’s a really special record. It’s a difficult thing to do, to continue doing what we’re doing at this point. Well, I guess it’s easy for some people. We’ve had some success and it would be easy to just copy what we’ve done, but to stay relevant and to stay important and to stay internally happy and satisfied it’s really essential to kind of kick it up a notch. One of the things that came into my mind with the process was, this is our seventh record. Obviously we’re very lucky to have a career that’s lasted this long. Who knows how long it’s going to last? A lot of people don’t get to be there this long, so we’re very lucky. And let’s take note of the fact that as a fan of many different types of music – metal, rock, – I’ve never, ever said “Oh I love that band. Their seventh record is the best one.” Nobody ever says that! So I in the back of my head this was very important for me. It may not be that, but it was important for me to come up with a way to create a very record that, in a legitimate way, could be as good if not more important than our first, second, third record, whatever the case may be in the fan’s minds. So I wanted to push myself as a player and not rest on what we’d done before, not go for the cash grab or the label money or whatever. We don’t have to make metal records. We’re in a very fortunate spot and we don’t have to do this. We want to do this. But there’s no reason – because we don’t have to do this – to repeat ourselves, and there’s no reason to not try to step it up and do something that’s more than what we’ve done before.
INTERVIEW: Periphery’s Misha Mansoor
A lot has happened since I Heart Guitar last interviewed Misha Mansoor. In the space of a mere year, the djent movement – of which Mansoor’s band Periphery is a central focus – has gone from metal curiosity to fully-fledged phenomenon. The Icarus Lives! Ep has further solidified Mansoor’s reputation as one of the most technically gifted metal guitarists of his generation, yet he maintains an open dialog with fans, continuing to post video and audio of random jammage – new gear, Nyan cat, the list goes on. Periphery are heading to Australia in July for the League Of Extraordinary Djentlemen tour with Tesseract, and I Heart Guitar caught up with Misha to talk about what’s happened in the past year.
Hey Misha.
Hi! We’ve talked before, haven’t we?
Yes we have, about a year ago.
Yeah! I Heart Guitar! I remember that.
Yeah, cool! So the Melbourne stop of your Aussie tour has recently been upgraded to a bigger venue because ticket sales were so good.
Yeah! That was very unexpected. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know who we paid off to make that happen! But that is more than a pleasant surprise. Australia was one of the most fun tours – it was like a vacation to us. I don’t know what it is, but everyone was so nice and welcoming. And I’m not just saying that. Australians are like some of the nicest people we’ve ever met. It was a treat, and having some of the love come right back to us was really awesome. So seeing that the shows sold out so fast was like icing on the cake for us.
Everyone seems to know who you are and about the whole djent movement now. How are you coping with that? Does it mess with your head? Do you try not to think about it?
I try not to think about it. This whole djent movement thing is very funny and silly to me because it’s appearing out of nowhere, almost parallel to what we’re doing. I think people don’t realise that we’ve just been doing what we’ve been doing. It wasn’t cool to be playing this style of music for the majority of the time that we’ve been writing and playing the music that we do, and we write and play the music that we do because it’s the only thing that we know how to do. It’s just going for it. It’s not like we sat down one day and said “I’m gonna start a new fad or something.” It wasn’t like that at all, it was just doing what we were doing. So it’s just interesting to see how that all happens. It is very surreal. And we focus on it a bit, like we named our tour the League Of Extraordinary Djentlemen. We don’t take it all too seriously, and it’s not all that relevant to me in day to day life or anything. It just is what it is, y’know?
COOL VIDEO ALERT: Misha Mansoor’s Mackie HD1221 live setup
Check out this video of Periphery’s Misha Mansoor taking you through his live rig.
Keep an eye out on I Heart Guitar this weekend for my new interview with Misha!
Hi! I'm Peter Hodgson. I write for Gibson.com, Australian Guitar, Australian Musician, Mixdown Magazine (including my instructional column, 'Unleash Your Inner Rock God,' which has been running since 2007), Blunt, Beat (including their weekly hard rock/metal column Crunch) and The Brag. And I'm Assistant Social Coordinator with Seymour Duncan.
I've been playing guitar since I was 8 years old, and I've been writing for magazines since I was 18. I've also worked as a guitar teacher (up to 50 students a week), a setup tech, a newspaper editor, and I've also dabbled in radio a little bit. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and my hobbies include drinking way too much coffee, and eating way too much Mexican food.
You can check out my guitar playing at Bandcamp or on YouTube, and feel free to email me at iheartguitarblog@gmail.com