MAMMATUS
"Mammatus is a band that is heavily influenced by our natural surroundings. The direction of the wind, the color of the sky, the size and shape of clouds, the amount of moisture in the soil, all of these things can change the way our music sounds at any given time."
Formed as far back as 2005, Corralitos, California based Mammatus, are leading the vanguard of the new wave of psychedelic heavy rock filling the gap left by the more commercial trajectory of
the likes of Monster Magnet. On their sophomore album, "The Coast Explodes", the band unveils some super sonic heavy psych, encompassing several stylistic variations on the progressive-psychedelic axis. The album is rife with thick swirling riffs, harmonious soundscapes, sonic freak-outs and a powerfull rhythm section keeping everything on track. Lyrically, Mammatus
continue to explore the ongoing battle between light and darkness, and they continue the battle saga that began in their
first album with "Dragon of the Deep Part Three."
"The Coast Explodes" is out on California's own Holy Mountain Records
Words | MammAaron
Mammatus is a band that is heavily influenced by our natural surroundings. The direction of the wind, the color of the sky, the size and shape of clouds, the amount of moisture in the soil, all of these things can change the way our music sounds at any given time.
Therefore it wasn't by chance then that we decided to record at the tail end of summer. We were trying to communicate the feelings we receive from the environmental elements that make up the California coastline during this season.
We had just finished a mind blowing tour with Residual Echoes, which ended with a four day drive across the desert in 115
degree heat. We were pooped. Rather than getting to it right away, we got lazy and just started hanging out at the beach. Practice sessions would turn into boogie boarding trips or burrito runs, which annoyed me at first but gradually I realized this was just partof the process and it ended up working to our advantage.
On our first record we were so anxious to get it released that we ignored obvious
flaws in favor of expediency. This time we let everything breathe, quite a bit.
The more time we took, the more our preconceived notions of how things were
to be went away, which in turn let much of the album arrange itself. Even though we had
spent over a year writing and arranging material, two of the songs [ "The Changing Wind" and "The
Coast Explodes") were conceived and recorded somewhat spontaneously and after we had already
begun recording.
The biggest problem we encountered was the realization that these songs are really hard to play perfectly.
When tracking a ten minute song, odds are you might slip up on one note or hit the drum a
fragment of a second off time, which ruins the whole performance and forces you to start over.
When playing live, the audience may not even notice a mistake or not care, for the power and the emotion
being expressed in the performance is what they are paying attention to. But on a record, the error is there
forever, becoming an everlasting thorn in the musicians' flesh. We spent days playing songs over
and over, getting more and more frustrated.
After playing a song thirty times and not getting a good take, you start
to loose the enjoyment of playing and it becomes simply a task you have to
accomplish. Of course, this causes the music to suffer and loose its energy.
"Excellent Swordfight" was the hardest hump to get over, and after we eventually
made it through everything else seemed relatively easy.
There was, however, one casualty. Anyone who had seen us live the previous
year could attest to the fact that our song "Wizards and Warriors" had one beautiful
and crushing riff, but the rest of the music around it was a
little weak. We had hoped to fix this on the album by adding lots of dreamy
overdubs to spruce it up, but after the initial tracking we decided it couldn't be
saved from its weakness and we sacked it.
Fortunately we had just created "The Coast Explodes", which was then called "Taco Bravo", so we had another
beefy song to make up for the dead one. This left only one hole that needed to be filled. We
had three heavy crazy electric guitar monster songs, so we wanted to have one sparse, simple, yet
ultimately trippy song to let the vibe mellow out a little bit. We didn't get exactly what
we were shooting for with The Changing Wind, but it is a cool song none the less.
I think in the end the album became the sound of what we were experiencing at the time, the
endless hazy electric joy of the golden California coastal sunset. So that's what we
put on the cover.
The sound of our recorded material is a very real and accurate replica of the band in its entirety. The songs are
recorded in the house where the ideas were first dreamed up, fleshed out, and rehearsed.
There is no sound more Mammatus than the sound inside that room. This does not mean that the
room has any acoustic quality to be praised, in fact it leaves much to be
desired, but it is the energy that only exists in the comfort of our home space
that would make recording anywhere else almost like lying to everyone. Also given the time we need to
take, it is the only affordable option.
Our recording equipment was very economic and simple: Cheap microphones, broken mic stands, cheap
single channel preamps, and an old Mac running Pro Tools. We tracked the songs live
using two drum overheads, one kick mic, one snare mic, and one mic on each of the speaker cabinets.
We then overdubbed the bass and guitar tracks, but left the originals in for girth.
No outboard or internal effects were used; everything you hear is what came out of the speakers.
The vocals were sung into a dynamic microphone through a Boss digital delay pedal and through
an amp with spring reverb. I placed a condenser mic between Nicky and the amp so I could
pick up the sound of his natural voice in the room as well as the amplifier. I ran many of the tracks [including drums]
out of various amplifiers back into the room, and picked up the new sounds by placing microphones as far
from the amps as I could. This adds many new colors and flavors to the sounds, and is a good
way to attempt to remove the blandness that occurs in digital recording.
By the time we were done tracking and overdubbing, we were able to pick up two key elements that helped the
sound enormously: A Soundcraft Ghost 24 console and an Empirical Labs Fatso Jr.
compressor. Mixing and EQ'ing through the board and beefing everything up through the
compressor [which has a sweet 'warmth processor' that totally over saturates
everything with analog flavor) gave the record a more sonically appealing
quality than our previous release.
THE COAST EXPLODES > On to the songs... Excellent Swordfight
This song started as a four track demo that Nicky made. It was four guitars layered on top of each
other playing the first riff of the song over and over. It sounded fat and gooey and delicious, and
we knew this was the beginning of a new song. It took about a year of tweaking and jamming and riff manipulation
before the song eventually became what it is on the record.
We played it live pretty much the whole time we were writing it, so people in Santa Cruz got to
hear it played several dramatically different ways. Because it was virtually impossible for us to play
the song all the way through without someone messing up, we recorded it in three
different segments and spliced them together. I think it might be fun for an interested listener to try to find
where those splices are.
The most enjoyable part of recording this was after the basic tracks were done and we got
to obsess over the tiny details. Nicky and I spent many nights together tweaking knobs and
moving mics to get the perfect tone on all his lead parts, which were played hundreds of times
to get the proper take. I got to borrow my friend Denney's Korg MS2000 synth to make all the
whoopdidoo sounds, which is difficult to do sparingly because of how fun it is.
Pierce the Darkness
This is another song rooted in a very rough demo. The first part that was written was the long guitar
solo over keyboards part in the middle of the song. Nicky recorded the three guitar harmonies
over a very silly sounding backing track we made with a drum machine and some rudimentary bass.
After that was done we added layers of Hammond C-4, this old Thomas Fantasy organ, and a Casio SK-1 using
a sampled vocal drone.
In the 'intro' to this segment I layered about 15 tracks of synth knob tweaking, trying to make
the oscillators chirp and tweet to mimic bird or insect sounds. This was very much inspired by the
opening of "Close to the Edge" by Yes. To announce the beginning of the guitar part I wanted a very
Rick Wakeman-esque synth lead, but I'm not a very accomplished keyboard player so I took
the really far out yet really simple route and just turned the portamento way up and let it ride.
When we were done we had a really far out song, or song segment that we had no idea
what to do with, but we knew it would be cool no matter where it went. Originally we had been talking about
having it be the very first thing you hear on the album, but we really didn’t know and just moved to
other things.
One day we got a phone call asking if we could play at a café in Santa Cruz. It was about three in the afternoon
and the show was to start at eight. Chris and Mike couldn't make it, so Nicky and I, who had been jamming
when we got the call, decided just to go do something spontaneous on our own.
We made up a riff on the spot and packed up and played a pretty fragmented and silly set. That riff
got played more and more and eventually became 'the mega man riff' because we thought it sounded like
something from Mega Man 3.
We played Mega Man a lot but we could never figure out what to do with it. We would rock up until the end
and then just get lost. One day we got into undiscovered territory and just started
jamming for a very very long time. This seemed to be the best way out of the song so we just
went for it. Suddenly it all got figured out, we would play the first part which was structured
and had lyrics, start jamming for as long as we could keep up, and then gently fizzle out.
This left the perfect hole for our previously recorded trip out segment, which was easily made complete when
we ended the song by repeating the riff much slower and heavier. Once we had this all figured out
tracking the song was a breeze, and the jam was still fresh and exciting.
The Changing Wind
We had a very basic idea: record a four man drum circle. Beyond that we had no idea what we
were doing. It actually took us an entire day of drumming the same thing over and
over to nail a good take. Nicky and Chris are playing cymbals and toms, Mike is playing a t
om with brushes, and I play the Djembe.
In the middle of recording, we went up to the very cold Corralitos creek and
jumped in, screaming like retards. This is the recording that starts the song. After the drums
were done, Nicky wrote the song over them with his miniature acoustic guitar called Little Face.
There are two acoustic guitars, Little Face and Big Face, which is of course the larger guitar.
The song is about feeling the changing seasons blowing in the wind. It was October and the
Earth was singing the song of change, which we tried to echo.
The Coast Explodes
This was probably the easiest and most enjoyable song to record on the album. An homage to the sea, meant
for dancing to. While working this one out we called it "Fat Man Walking to Taco Bravo." We imagined a
big fat dude walking down the sidewalk in sync to the beat of the song, arriving at Taco
Bravo and ordering some super nachos, which he eats while head banging to the chorus.
After we had tracked all the instruments, our friend Zach was hanging out and we thought it would be cool for
him to do some vocals. Zach plays songs under the name 'The Broads' and he has a very haunting and powerful voice.
“What should I sing dude?” We told him to just sing about the coast and all its majesty. I still don't know what
he's saying. The lyric sheet just says "Coast."
In order to make the final riff as heavy as the ocean, we layered two tracks of the Hammond, and another
track using just the bass pedals, which you can feel more than you can hear. There's some synth at the
end of the song trying to mimic the cry of seagulls. The song starts with some sea lions I recorded at the
end of the Santa Cruz municipal wharf and ends with some waves moving over rocks Nicky recorded at a
beach we call Weird Rock very near to where we photographed the album cover.
