Interview with Mike of eyes see red by Ron

So Mike, tell us about your band.
Well, we're called eyes see red (no caps, dammit!). Besides me on the drums, there's Christian, who plays bass and sings and Mathias, who plays guitars and occasionally does some backing vocals. The band sort of evolved out of a HC band called Last Warning where Christian and me played until that band broke up in Summer 1995. Nothing much happened except for a few pretty embarrassing rehearsal tapes until Mathias joined in fall 1996. Around that time, we put out a demo tape that Christian and me recorded before Mathias got into the band. Then in 1999, we released our first CD "Embrace It". And of course we're always playing as many live shows as we can get cuz that's really the main reason we play music.
Very true. So then you must have some crazy show stories. Wanna share one?
At a show about a year ago, we decided it was time to wear stupid clothes again, so Mathias wore a Hawaiian shirt and Christian a suit and tie. About two songs into the show, Christian had to take off the jacket and the tie because it was getting kinda hot what with the lights and all. He made some comment about it, and some girls in the audience promptly responded by yelling "take 'em all off". He just sort of laughed and we played the next song. When that song was through, the same girls yelled for us to take our clothes off again. So Mathias took off his shirt. Now Mathias has the kind of body most girls dream about, you know, sixpack and all that. So needless to say, they went apeshit - and yelled for Christian to take off is clothes too.
Haha. I can see where this is going.
Eventually he took his shirt off too, and believe me, seeing Christian shirtless is NOT a pretty sight. The guy's so white, it's ridiculous. And me without my sunglasses. Anyway, for some reason - presumably large quantities of alcoholic beverages - the girls loved it, and after the next song, they actually yelled "Mike, take it off!!" Since I was sweating like a motherfucker and thinking about getting out of my shirt to avoid passing out anyway, I figured what the hell, got up and did a sort of Chippendale strip, complete with swinging my shirt around and throwing it away at the end. The beer gut didn't stop the girls from screaming, for some reason. Heh. Anyway, we went on with the show, and as usual, the breaks in between songs got a bit longer cuz our drummer's a wuss and needs to drink water after every song. So now the guys started yelling stuff like "put your fucking clothes back on and play some more, we want to mosh, not look at your fucking chicken breasts!" And so on. It was great. Took us about 45 minutes to wipe the stupid grins off our faces after the show. That's what Metal shows are supposed to be like: FUN.
Damn right! Who would have thought, a strip tease at a metal show!
Hey, you know, "give the people what they want", and all that. You wanna see my big flabby gut? Here it is! I just hope you'll make it to the toilet before you puke cuz we have to clean this place up after the show.
"Embrace It" is a pretty solid death metal album. Is the recording process as hideously painful for you as a lot of people say it is?
Thanks. Oh yes, it is. Quite painful indeed. The damn thing took us four months to record, and towards the end we really just wanted to be done with it - plus that was four months without playing shows, which is pretty bad in itself. We recorded everything ourselves in the rehearsal room, so there was no time pressure or anything, but it was still bad enough. Christian has fun doing this kind of thing because he's really into the studio technology angle, but for Mathias and me it's just an excruciating process of trying to get songs you've been playing for over a year right with a click track and fucking up over and over again. That yelling you hear at the end of "The Need to Feed" is me throwing my sticks at the wall because I finally got it done after two days. Then Christian yelled "touchdown", but that's a long story.
Haha! I was actually going to ask you about that. So THAT'S what all the yelling is about.
Heh, yep. We decided to keep it on there because we had to document our relief, basically... And because I did it too early and it would've been a pain in the ass to edit away the noises. Ahem.
Are you more of a jam/riff band to come up with song ideas, or do you sit down and write?
Most definitely the "sit down and write" type of band. The jamming thing never worked for us. The only time we've done that was a clean part in the middle of a new song called "Rapture" which we sort of wrote together, but even that was more a matter of constructing than jamming and watching it come together. Usually one guy will write a complete song (we all play guitar - sort of, anyway), write down tabulators, record it with a drum machine and then hand it over to the other guys to learn it. In some very rare cases, two of us will work on a song together, but that doesn't happen a lot.
A new song? Is there going to be a new album anytime soon?
We have seven new songs that we're playing live now and five more waiting to be rehearsed. We're hoping we'll be able to start recording next spring. Which means we'll have to triple our usual song learning pace, but it's been a pretty long time since "Embrace It" came out and some of the new songs were actually written BEFORE that one came out, so it's high time we finally got off our asses and put a new CD together. Don't hold your breath though, we're recording a lot more songs this time, so I seriously doubt it'll be out before next fall. Yes, we're that slow.
Understandable, since you guys do all of this yourselves. Who did the artwork for the cd?
Me. I cringe when I look at it now, though...
Yeah, but that's true with everyone. Do you do a lot of artwork?
Not as much as I'd like to. I've been drawing since I was old enough to hold a pencil, and it's still what I love doing most, but lately I just haven't had any time to actually finish anything. I'm still working on a web comic that was supposed to go online in August (http://www.bigmommagrfx.cjb.net - there's also a thumbnail gallery with some other stuff). Of course I'm doodling all the time, but it's been a while since I got something really big done. Plus I just got screwed over on another illustration deal, which meant lots of time wasted for nothing - yet again.
Isn't that pretty much the way of things? Getting screwed seems to come with the job.
Definitely as far as any art-related job goes, yeah. I've actually done illustrations for an entire children's book which was never published, didn't get a cent for it and the two teachers who wrote the book are now using my illustrations for their classes and have copied them to dozens of other people. Can you say professional use of somebody else's copyrighted material? Somebody should sic Metallica's lawyers on these wimmins.
Haha! I hear ya! So then I take it esr is not actively searching for label support?
You bet your ass we're not. Even if you take away the whole "taking it up the backside on a regular basis" angle, there's just no point right now. I'm still in college and Christian is barely out of job training, so we couldn't pursue a record deal properly anyway. And besides, what's the point? Yeah, we could sell more CD's, yeah, we might get reviewed in the big magazines, maybe even be allowed to pay a few thousand dollars to open up for a big band (ahem), but ultimately, there's no money in this Death Metal thing anyway, and if somebody else starts telling us what we can and can't do in terms of music and artwork, we might as well stop doing it altogether. There's no point in putting up with all the crap that comes with being in a band to us if we can't play EXACTLY the type of shit we want to play. We're definitely going to try and get a good distro deal for the next CD, though.
So how can people get their hands on "Embrace It"?
It's available in a few CD stores in Switzerland and the Swiss online CD store cede.ch (all German and I don't know if they ship to the US, so don't bother). Outside the country, you can get it through our web site at http://www.eyesseered.com.
About that CD. For me, it seems to get stronger and tighter as the album progresses. Is that just me?
Well, nobody's ever said that before, so maybe it is just you... I dunno, the order of the songs on album has nothing to do with the order they were recorded in (i.e. "first song we recorded where we didn't know what the hell we were doing yet",etc), but now that I look at the song listing, I can see what you mean. The last two are the oldest songs, so obviously they were easier to get right, "The Quickening" is one of the few songs we didn't record too slow and I guess "Laughing" turned out pretty good too. Maybe it's just because the songs get faster and a little more straightforward towards the end, that makes them easier to record.
Well, it's a good album, and I look forward to more from esr. By the way, why no caps in the band's name?
No big reason, really, it just looks better that way - the e's are all the same if there's no capital "E" in "eyes", and since the words are all pretty short capitals would be sort of disruptive. But people get our name wrong all the time anyway, so what the hell...
What is Metalheads Against Racism, and how are you involved?
Basically, it's intended as a way for people to say that they're against racism without having to run around making PC speeches or writing songs about it, because most of us don't feel like doing that. Racism is has become a huge problem in the European Metal scene over the last few years. Unlike in the US, Neo-Nazis are actually a serious issue here, and via the interest in Paganism in Metal, especially Black Metal, they've sort of entered the scene via the back door. So-called "Neo-Paganism" is a big part of Nazi ideologies here, it's really different from the Religious Right you have in the US. Anyway, these days there are organized Nazi groups within the Metal scene and bands openly propagating "White Supremacy". The reason this happened, the way I see it that since Metal is unpolitical and we like it that way, nobody bothered to say anything when these people first appeared in our scene. That includes me, of course. I just figured they'd go away again eventually. But there were more of them every year. Now from my experience, once you tell these idiots that they're not wanted, they run away with their tails between their legs screaming "Commie!". We had a few of them at our very first show back in '97, and all it took was for Mathias to get into a debate with one of them about whether or not multiculturalism is "unnatural", and whaddayaknow, they never showed up at another esr show. So I figured t would be a good idea to offer people a "lazy" way to say "racism sucks", basically, because the vast majority of Metalheads aren't racists, and they don't want to share their scene with racists, they just don't know how to voice their opinion. And that's why I set up the site (http://www.metalheadsagainstracism.org/ -that's shameless plug #3 for those keeping count). If you have a web site, you put one of our banners on it, and we'll put your name on the list. That way, you have a big "Against Racism" banner on your site and a link to a three-point declaration that basically says you're not a racist and you don't want racists in the Metal scene. Of course people without web sites can just put their names on the list too. Think of it as kind of a petition. Of course I got some pretty nasty reactions too, some people called me and everyone on the members list left wing extremists, "red bastards" (sic), or "a shame to the Metal scene". And some dickless loser left rude comments on Jenn's web site because she's actively supporting it. But that just proves it's necessary, I think.
Yeah, I saw that post on Jenn's site. Of course he didn't leave any contact information. Fucking nazis...
Well, that's typical. Most of these scumbags are the biggest cowards you've ever seen. The last time there was a big riot here in Zürich involving Nazi Skinheads, all the people hospitalized afterwards were teenage girls. Can you believe it? Five Skinheads beat up a 15-year old girl with a crowbar. Nice going, Aryan Superhumans. Nice going.
What are you listening to these days?
The last two good CD's I bought are "Dahmer" by Macabre and "Wages of Sin" by Arch Enemy. Macabre are just fucking incredible. I've kind of ignored them up until now, and a few weeks ago I got the Gloom" re-release for a review, and I was just blown away by how funny and original they are. I've really been missing out. Of course now I get to buy all their shit within a few months, so that's okay, really, hehe. They just have a style completely their own, they're riotously funny and actually far better musicians than most people give them credit for. And Arch Enemy are, well, they're god. If you don't realize you have to buy EVERY CD Michael Amott played on, you're beyond hope, really.
Yeah, Macabre is amazing. I saw them about a month ago. Great band. Well, that's all the questions I have. Have we missed any shameless plugs?
Hmmm.... I don't think so. Although if we take Chris X's definition of "shameless plugs", I've missed quite a few of those in my life.
Haha! Chris X the mighty vegan! He's a good guy though, I think...
Hey, I wouldn't be using his comedy material if I didn't think he's okay. He just needs to eat a big fat steak and wash it down with a bottle of Belgian beer, but otherwise he's cool, hargh hargh.
I can only imagine...Well, thanks a lot for your time Mike, hopefully MAR will spread like inhalation anthrax, and we can get rid of the nazis once and for all. You keep making music, and we'll keep listening to it.
Hey, thanks for doing this, Ron, and thanks to Jenn and everyone else at Metal Mafia, of course.
Absolutely. No problem, Mike.
http://www.eyesseered.com
http://www.myspace.com/eyesseered
http://www.metalheadsagainstracism.org/