Amos Williams - TesseracT 'Abundance of Ambition'

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen the rise of livestream shows and we're definitely here for them. But once they're over, they're over; you'll never get to see it or experience it again, right? Wrong! Prog-metal gods TesseracT have made their cinematic experience of P O R T A L S last forever in the form of a Blu-ray, DVD, CD, and vinyl! These of course include many extra goodies including a behind the scenes documentary, a book with extensive liner notes, etc. And it's all available on August 27 (our review here).

But you know us here at Wall of Sound, we like to find out a bit more about things, so we caught up with bass player, Amos Williams, over Zoom, and what did we discover? TesseracT's creative capacity is far greater than we imagined.

"What I'm intrigued about is where things are going. We'll soon be in the capacity to be able to live stream any show from anywhere in the world because of mobile networks so that's really exciting to us. We like the concept of opening that door to anybody at any point, and the nature of the way TesseracT works is that our ambitions are so much higher than perhaps we can achieve sometimes but because we've pushed ourselves we're still raising our collective game every time. That's why P O R T A L S went that extra mile, simply because our ambitions far outstripped the realisation, but the realisation still far, far outstripped anything we'd ever done so far."

https://youtu.be/e5PveLOphtU

When working inside the limitation that a pandemic forces on you, sometimes your brainstorming sessions produce some progressive ideas, and that's when Amos told us that the band is launching a Twitch channel soon, around the end of August.

"This is TesseracT you're talking to, we once sold some coffee... We will quite happily explore any avenue for a creative output, and I think we've hit the nail on the head with allowing ourselves freedom to explore the story element of TesseracT."

That led us to thinking about VR, which is growing immensely in popularity (Beat Saber anyone?), and just imagine what bands could do with that technology. You could be in your room with a headset, and yet be at a gig? So of course, we put it to Amos and he said, "We are developing that! Within our Twitch channel the singer has been building his own virtual world because he thinks it's a very cool thing to be exploring VR. It's almost like a forum, and instead of being typed you'll have an avatar. We're going to see how that goes because it's not something that's at the forefront of our development plans, but we could, for example, have a virtual screening room where we show videos of past gigs or even premier videos on there. We'll see. This is the beauty of it, there's freedom to just try the idea."

How bright is the future looking? Full interview below.

Interview by Ebony Story

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Grab your hard copy here!

TesseracT – P O R T A L S tracklisting

1. Of Matter (P O R T A L S) [13:55]
2. King (P O R T A L S) [06:28]
3. Concealing Fate Parts 1, 2 & 3 (P O R T A L S) [18:15]
4. Tourniquet (P O R T A L S) [04:30]
5. Beneath My Skin / Mirror Image (P O R T A L S) [05:44]
6. Orbital (P O R T A L S) [02:06]
7. Juno (P O R T A L S) [06:11]
8. Cages (P O R T A L S) [05:28]
9. Dystopia (P O R T A L S) [06:43]
10. Phoenix (P O R T A L S) [04:18]
11. Nocturne (P O R T A L S) [04:21]
12. Eden (P O R T A L S) [06:30]
13. Of Energy (P O R T A L S) [11:05]
14. Seven Names (P O R T A L S) [05:02]

https://youtu.be/veqQXYhJNeg