Karl Sanders - Nile 'People Radically Underestimate What It Takes To Turn That Sonic Abuse Into Something That You Can Listen To"
One of the few extreme metal acts with an immediately distinguishable and unique sound, North American titans Nile have been smiting their tech death competition for over 30 years now. Relentlessly fast and brutal, the act helmed by Karl Sanders’ has stood out from their peers with their rich and all-encompassing Egyptian influence. Their upcoming 10th studio release - The Underworld Awaits Us All - sees Sanders’ and longtime drumming weapon George Kollias take the second step in the current chapter of Nile history, with both fresh blood and returning contributors fleshing out the monstrous new LP.
Ahead of the brand new record’s unveiling on August 23rd - and subsequent Australian tour in October - Wall of Sound had the pleasure to chat with founding member, guitarist, and visionary Karl Sanders. We got to pick the South Carolinians’ brains about all things Nile, the new album, the band’s upcoming Aussie shows, lyrical influences, self-producing music, and of course, ancient Egypt. Despite being armed with a back catalogue of over 100 original tracks, Sanders admits off the bat that coming up with fresh material isn’t a challenge or chore - but forcing creativity can turn it into one;
"Basically, if you're a guitar player, there's riffs that are going to come out. It just happens. It's part of it. So we're not lacking in inspiration. George (Kollias) is always playing drums, so he's always got drum ideas. You know, (guitarists) Brian (Kingsland) and Zach (Jeter) are always playing. So there are always new guitar ideas. It's not necessarily an endless well, and not every riff that we come up with manages to make its way into a song. That is where it comes from; we love to play music, so we're always riffing. But, as soon as you try to dictate to the muse, it goes away. You can't force yourself to be creative. You can be disciplined and work on your craft every day. That's a little bit different. Not always is gold just gonna fall out of the sky, like when you hear a Nile record. You know that's not just because we sat down in 10 minutes and said, “Okay, we’re done writing the record”. No, those songs took years to put together. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into taking the inspiration that we had and crafting it into something."
With a new Nile lineup in place on The Underworld Awaits Us All, guitarist and vocalist Brian Kingsland - featuring on his second Nile release - stepped up to the plate with musical contributions, though he will be taking a back seat during the record’s touring cycle;
"Brian wrote three songs for this record. He played lots of guitar, sang lots of vocals - but we’re still a four-piece. Brian doesn't tour. He's got three kids now, so he's not going anywhere. He's got a job to attend to, and the job of parenting. So we still think of ourselves as a four-piece. Zach and Dan (Vadim Von) didn't really come on board until the record was already written and half-recorded already, so we’re basically still a four-piece on paper."
Speaking of Dan Vadim Von, Sanders quickly points out the group’s new bassist/vocalist - who also plays guitar in Morbid Angel - though a late addition to the project, is a massive score for Nile .
"Dude, he's one motherfucking hell of a guitar player. You definitely you gotta be on your toes when he's around. (But) he plays bass with Nile; he doesn't even touch a guitar when he comes over. He really wanted to be a bass player in this band. He easily could have done the guitar job if he had wanted to - and done an amazing job - but he wanted to play bass. He loves playing bass. That was a really nice phone call with him when he said he really wanted the job, and he showed up prepared and knew all the songs. I didn't have to do any parenting whatsoever. This guy is a pro through and through."
Though he may have only contributed the low end for The Underworld Awaits Us All, Vadim Von’s fellow Nile -debutant Zach Jeter was able to add his voice to the group’s unholy choir.
"(Vadim Von) had a lot of touring commitments, so the vocals were already done by the time he got here to play bass. So sadly, we were not able to work his vocals in but we worked with Zach (Jeter). He's got a range that's very similar to Brian's, so it's sometimes a little tough, unless you're really familiar with both of them, to be able to pick them apart, which worked out really well because he’s fit in there so remarkably easy."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2N5TjIS7bw
The Underworld Awaits Us All - like 2019’s Vile Nilotic Rites - is a mostly in-house affair with Sanders handling the production and a bulk of the recording. While this may cut down the fees associated with travel and studio/gear hire, it presents its challenges;
"There’s always trade-offs, no matter which route you choose. If you're doing everything at home, well, you're home, you don't have a big hotel bill, but it's also hard. Every distraction that you have at home makes itself apparent over the course of however many months you're working on that record. So there's trade-offs at home. You can work as long as you want, and no one's gonna run in there going, hey (*taps invisible watch*)."
Not that Nile hasn’t had a wealth of experience under their collective sleeves, with the years spent working with the veteran and highly diverse producer Neil Kernon;
"Well, working next to a guy like Neil Kernon for five records, you can't help but not learn something, because man, he's done like 500 records. He's got Grammys hanging on his wall. So he knows how to make records, that's for damn sure. So hopefully we learned a few things along the way…"
Like the aforementioned Vile Nilotic Rites, engineer Mark Lewis was enlisted to handle the new LP’s incredibly dense mix. Though he may have a decade or two less experience than Kernon, Lewis is no greenhorn himself - thanks to work with Whitechapel and The Black Dahlia Murder - with Sanders and Nile putting their full confidence in him;
"It's pretty easy - we just pick up the phone and talk to him; “what do you think we do with this thing?” And whatever he tells us, we're smart enough to listen to him. People radically underestimate what it takes to try and take all that sonic abuse and turn it into something that you can listen to. It eats the mix (fast double kicks), and then you add some down-tuned guitars and some low screaming, growling vocals. How on earth do you hear anything?"
https://www.instagram.com/p/C30H6hFLpI1/?hl=en
With literally thousands of years of fascinating history to explore and write about, it’s unlikely Sanders will run out of inspiration - “not in this lifetime”, he quips - with NILE exploring deep into Egyptian history, such as the lyrical content on The Underworld Awaits Us All’s mid-album cut ‘Naqada II’;
"The Naqada II period of Egyptian archeology was a pre-Dynastic Period, but it was also a period of great expansion; writing was formalised, and many of the Egyptian religions were codified into set forms. There's also economic growth brought about by the gold mines that sprung up all in the eastern desert, which is the core of this song, because of those gold mines and because of the people that fought and subjugated those lands and areas where the gold mines were, and basically turned those people into second class citizens. So a little bit of manifest destiny going on because of that. When we say “There is a promised land waiting for us, of enlightenment”, that's what we're talking about. We're talking about bringing about the golden age by slaughtering all the indigenous inhabitants."
It’s not only the lyrics that are steeped in Egyptian influence, with the even instrumental interludes taking influence from the culture. The immensely titled ‘The Pentagrammathion Of Nephren-ka’ both reaches back into the band’s history and highlights Sanders’ advanced musical knowledge.
"This comes from a guitar lesson I had with (legendary shredder) Rusty Cooley where we were dissecting two concepts. The first one would be ‘Nephren-ka’; during the years that we were doing the early Nile songs, there was no scale that actually fit those songs, so we had to make what's called a synthetic scale, which is basically it's not a scale that exists, but you need one, so you make it up that's specific to those purposes. So a lot of those songs on that album - Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka - use the ‘Nephren-ka’ scale. Because we made it up, necessity is a mother of invention, the ‘Nephren-ka’ scale is a six-note scale. It's not seven. It's only got six notes. And it's kind of like a Locrian mode with no sixth degree.
The other part of this story, the ‘Pentagrammathion’ part, is yet another lesson I had with Rusty Cooley, where if you take any five-note scale, through the magic of how those notes are laid out, if you take out any one of those notes, maybe it's this Note, maybe it's this note, maybe it's this note. You're left with a four-note scale, which just happens to be a quartal minor, 11th chord, no matter which one of these notes you take out, which is kind of fascinating. So if you're left with this four-note chord, if you add back in a fifth note, and it doesn't have to be the same note that you took out, it could be a different note. Now we got five notes again, but depending on which note you stick back in there, you get an entirely different mode or tonality and a different set of chords that you can derive from this new artificial five-note mode. This is the pentagrammathion, because there are so many possibilities that it's kind of like having a dial that's got five points, and you can spin it around and wherever you spin it and add something random in, you get something new. That concept of yeah, it just changes every time. So ‘The Pentagrammathion Of Nephren-ka’ is where we took the ‘Nephren-ka’ scale and put it inside this pentagram wheel and spun it around and see what chords and tonalities and melodies are derived from, wherever the five-pointed dial ended up."
A noted major history buff - no surprises there - WoS couldn’t pass on the opportunity to get the Nile frontman’s views on the ultimate question; where the hell did we come from?
"I think we're aliens. I think we're not necessarily native to this planet. I think we came here from somewhere else, destroyed ourselves a couple of times, and what’s left after all that period of chaos, that's what we have left, and that's why no one knows where the fuck we came from. The early part of human history and civilisation is riddled with unknowns. Where did we come from? Where did these ideas come from? How do the Egyptians have such an advanced civilisation? Well, I think it came from before and just no one remembers. (The) last Ice Age, when the sea levels rose 400 meters. There's a whole lot of stuff sitting out there, covered by water that we have no idea where the fuck it is. What was there? Just imagine if you took our sea level right now and raised it by 400 meters, how much of our current civilisation would then be underwater? So what happened at the end of the last stage? How do we know what was before the end of the last ice age? We only have a few things you know left. So you know, and how much shit survives 10,000 years of natural decay? Not much. Why do we still even know about the Egyptians? Well, they managed to build some shit that lasted 1000s of years, right? Otherwise, would we know anything about them? No, we wouldn’t; or it just be speculation, hearsay, and rumour."
Back to the music; the October Australian tour for The Underworld Awaits Us All will see Nile return here for the first time in nine years (dates below). Of course, as Australian tech-death metal fans no doubt recall, we should have been blessed by their presence on the last record’s tour cycle in April 2020 with Ingested, until that pesky worldwide pandemic reared its head…
"The last thing we had on our plate before Covid happened was Japan and Australia, and I remember going through the frigging process to get our visas, which are not cheap for both Australia and Japan and having to drive my ass all day down to the Japanese consulate in Atlanta multiple times, Because every time they changed the projection about how long was this Covid thing gonna last, we had to go reapply for our visas. So it turned into this big, stupid fucking headache. The Japanese guys didn't want to cancel the shows because they didn't want to have to give people their money back, so they kept it hanging on until the very last possible second, which was just insanity, because for me to drive to Atlanta, that six-hour round trip, even in normal traffic, but we're talking about downtown Atlanta. That's no place that you want to fucking drive if you ain't got to and especially with this like just looming thought, “Well, is this gonna happen? What the fuck is going on?”. The wives and the girlfriends were losing their minds. Like, “You can't go, you can't go”. Well, we gotta go! We signed a contract that says we gotta go but can’t go."
Fortunately - baring another global crisis - Nile will hit Australian and New Zealand shores this October for six shows; needless to say, the band is chomping at the bit to bring the brutality down under;
"Well, hopefully, we will be there! Cross your fingers nothing terrible happens between now and then. We will be there, and we will be playing Nile songs new and old. We will bring the metal; metal will take place."
Ending our chat with Nile’s legendary vocalists and guitarist, Sanders leaves us with this ominous final message ahead of the band’s forthcoming 10th opus;
"The Underworld Awaits Us All, and we will see you there."
Interview by Andrew Kapper. Twitter: @andrew_kapper
Pre-order The Underworld Awaits Us All here.
Nile – The Underworld Awaits Us All tracklisting
1. Stelae of Vultures2. Chapter for Not Being Hung Upside Down on a Stake in the Underworld and Made to Eat Feces by the Four Apes3. To Strike with Secret Fang4. Naqada II Enter the Golden Age5. The Pentagrammathion of Nephren-Ka6. Overlords of the Black Earth7. Under the Curse of the One God8. Doctrine of Last Things9. True Gods of the Desert10. The Underworld Awaits us All11. Lament for the Destruction of Time
Nile - Australian and New Zealand Tour 2024with Carnal Viscera
Tuesday 15 October PERTH - Milk Bar/Civic Hotel
Wednesday 16 October ADELAIDE - The Gov
Thursday 17 October BRISBANE - The Brightside
Friday 18 October MELBOURNE - Max Watts
Saturday 19 October HOBART - Uni Bar
Sunday 20 October SYDNEY - Crowbar
Tuesday 22 October AUCKLAND - Whammy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmwqMQ2g0NQ&pp=ygUETmlsZQ%3D%3D
