The Progressive Process: An Interview with Neil Purdy of Luna's Call

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    I recently had the privilege of probing Neil Purdy of Luna's Call on a few questions I've had floating around in my head since the release of the monumental Void back in August. This release has quickly become one of my favorites of the year and I felt it appropriate to get in contact with him. So without any bullshit, here's what I had to ask, and what he had to say:

Makeshift Altars: Since the release of Void, what have Luna's Call been up to, and what are your plans?

Neil Purdy: With the current state of the world it’s very difficult to plan for live appearances, so we’re trying to focus as much as we can on our online presence. 

    We recently launched a Kickstarter project where fans can pre-order Void on vinyl and we reached our goal within five hours.  When imagining the album as a finished item and the track order, a vinyl release was always thought about and how it would work best. The album artwork alone longs to be displayed as a larger format on a vinyl jacket.

    We have a few other plans coming up in the way of playthrough videos and working on some interesting covers. After that, we’d best start working on album number 3 as our average time between albums is around 5 years (hopefully it won’t take that long next time!).

 

MA: Coming into the writing of Void, what sort of conscious (or unconscious) decisions did you make to distinguish it from its predecessor, Divinity?

 

NP: I went into the writing of this album with the idea that it needs to be all out progressive in every sense of the word. It needed to showcase how we’ve grown as a band, as musicians and songwriters without seeming to be an album of just “showing off”.

    A conscious decision we discussed previously was that we wanted to expand our sound in every direction, the heavier parts needed to be heavier than we’ve ever been. The softer parts needed to be more emotional and melancholic.

    Whilst we love Divinity, we did not want to make the same album twice. We enjoy bands with a diverse discography and we believe this makes live sets much more interesting.

 

 MA: I'm curious what sort of not-so-obvious influences and inspirations, musical or not, factor into your sound. 

 

NP: There are influences all throughout Void from so many different places; music, films and life experiences. Music wise, obviously we like our death metal, new and old, along with a love for progressive rock bands like Camel, Rush and Genesis.  Some of the less obvious artists such as Pentangle, Laura Marling, Iamthemorning, Dead Can Dance, Simon and Garfunkel, Queen and The Beatles played a big part in the writing of this album.

    Films have always played a big part in songwriting, musically and lyrically. Well known composers such as John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and Ennio Morricone are somewhat obvious in the orchestral elements on the album, in particular the break in “Fly Further Cosmonaut”. The score from the film The Witch, composed by Mark Korven was rooted in my mind whilst writing string sections, likewise for other instrumentation with Goblin’s music written for the original Suspiria.

    The Wickerman (original) in particular has always been a favourite of ours, the bright happy appearance of the film with an unsettling feel underlying throughout. This story in particular bears resemblance to the lyrical theme of “Solar Immolation”, a sort of lovechild of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine and The Wickerman.

 

 MA: A lot of press and your own Bandcamp bio makes comparison to pre-Heritage Opeth. I find it amusing to have so much description surrounding such a capstone metal band. Do you find yourselves yearning for that era of their music? Or is the comparison coincidental?

 

NP: Whilst we are grateful and find it very complimentary to be compared to Opeth, a band we all love we’ve discussed this within the band countless times and are still unsure why we get branded with the “early Opeth” label. To me, the phrase “early Opeth” creates the image of chordal guitar passages with heavy reverb, a sound that’s closer to black metal with underlying death metal drums and the progressive elements of long acoustic, almost psychedelic passages.

    I believe a lot of reviewers and listeners make this comparison to Opeth based solely on the inclusion of mixed vocal styles and the fact my voice shares a similar range to Mikael. We often thought about trying different approaches to the vocals during the recording process, however this often felt unnatural. There are a lot of extreme metal bands we like that only include purley guttural, sometimes incoherent vocals. Mikael’s growls however, include an important element and the one thing I’ve wanted as an integral part of my vocal style, definition and enunciation when expressing the lyrics. There are plenty of other vocalists we praise for this technique notably David Vincent from Morbid Angel and more recently Dan Nightingale from Conjurer.

 

 MA: What is the band’s writing process like? I’m inclined to believe it’s a bit stream-of-consciousness with how varied and rapid the styles of music you employ are. But I’m interested in how deliberate you all are in how you approach writing such music.

 

NP: Divinity was written in between a break at university, I had completed the majority of the album and recorded a rough version, then showed it to Brad and Jamie with no intention of forming or going into a live situation. This idea just snowballed into wanting to take this somewhere to see if we even could.

    The writing for Void wasn’t too dissimilar, there are riffs and sections on this album that were written even previous to Divinity. It was more a case of trial and error, like pieces to a puzzle. I had an image in my head of how I wanted the songs to be but turning that into a finished piece takes time, revisiting and reshaping sections over and over until it’s something I was happy with. I remember Brad showing us the riff to “In Bile They Bathe”, originally named “Morbid” as we knew instantly we wanted something on this album to act as a homage to the old school death metal bands we love like Morbid Angel and Entombed.

    Patience plays a massive part when songwriting, I don’t want to write something for the sake of filling a section and moving on if I’m inevitably not going to be happy with it.

    There are certain parts of this album which I can recall writing at the weirdest of times like vocal lines to “Fly Further Cosmonaut” coming to me whilst driving on the motorway, trying to stop at a service station to quickly record it. Writing vocal lines for “Locus” in a garage whilst waiting for my car to be MOT’d. The intro section to “Fly Further” was written at 05:00 in the morning when waiting to start recording the drums for the song.

    I don’t believe there’s anything deliberate in the way we write the songs, other than the constant re-evaluating whether the material is good enough or whether it works for the idea of the song.

 

MA: Void seems to revolve around multiple apocalyptic scenarios, flight from Earth, inevitable demise. Do you find this a concept album? Is there a narrative?

 

NP: There are certainly themes running throughout this album, both musically and lyrically.
Other than the overall sci-fi and space imagery, there is no narrative set in stone for this album. The album certainly holds the idea of moving forward into the unknown and I believe this works on multiple levels, even more so and coincidentally for the events (or lack of) of this year.

    There is something exciting but also very unsettling about not knowing what’s ahead of us, whether it be Luna’s Call itself or even the current state of the world - environmentally or politically. I believe Void manages to express that in it’s imagery.

 

MA: Who designed the cover art anyway? There’s a lot going on there, some presumed god, clouds, fish, the earth, space, a black hole.

 

NP: The cover was designed by Ian Purdy, depicting various scenes and themes from the album.

    A lot of it is based on the stories behind “Solar Immolation” and “Fly Further Cosmonaut”.

    In the very early stages of the writing I knew that I wanted the cover art to be something eye-catching, colourful and would look great on a vinyl sleeve. I went to Ian with some of the ideas I had and existing album art as reference like The Moody Blues’ In Search of the Lost Chord and Mastodon’s Crack the Skye. He took all this and came back to us with this incredible masterpiece of artwork which fits the theme and sound of the album perfectly.

 

MA: Speaking of space, there’s quite a bit of moon-related language in the band’s work (Luna, Enceladus, etc.). Are celestial bodies something you find as a recurring theme or fascination?

 

NP: Celestial bodies do seem to be a recurring theme in our writing, I wouldn’t say that it’s deliberate however. “Enceladus” for example, the lyrical themes weren’t written with Saturn’s moon in mind. The lyrics were actually relating to a particular personal point in my life, however, the theory that Enceladus could potentially be habitable for life worked well with the actual lyrics and the album’s overall space and sci-fi themes.

 

 MA: I, and others within Makeshift Altars, come from a background rooted in progressive rock and metal. As you can probably tell by what we had to say about Void, after so long in the scene, we personally feel a little jaded about the genre. Can you sum up your definition, or, if you prefer, your viewpoint on progressive music? As artists esteemed in making it feel fresh to wary listeners, how do you approach the music and not become derivative?

 

NP: It’s tough to define a genre that by its own design, usually tries to be as broad as it can be. I’m uncertain how I feel about the genre or word “progressive”, I do believe it’s used far too often. There used to be a certain image or sound in my head when the word progressive was mentioned, whether followed by metal or rock but now it’s starting to become a blur and sometimes a sound I’m not keen on.

     I’m not a fan of labelling or trying to fit every band into hundreds of sub genres, it seems any band that starts slightly experimenting is instantly labelled as progressive, which by definition is correct but should it still be labelled this way?

     We write the music that we would like to listen to, to make it something original and unique. On Void we’ve certainly paid homage and nodded to a few bands in particular but I believe we’ve still kept it our own.

    When it does come to the writing process, this is where you have to be ruthless. I don’t want anything in there that’s just “filler” or unnecessary, everything that’s written should be written for a reason and to serve the song or album. It’s a lengthy process that takes a lot of patience and determination but in the end I believe it’s worth it.

Go have a listen to Luna's Call and their new record Void here: https://lunascall.bandcamp.com/album/void

Read Eric's review of Void here: https://makeshiftaltars.blogspot.com/2020/09/lunas-call-void-review.html