PreEmptive Strike 0.1 Interview

Holy shit! I interviewed PreEmptive Strike 0.1 for Regen Magazine. Read the best Q/A article ever written by an entity that's not inter-demensional in nature by clicking here: http://regenmag.com/interviews/preemptive-strike-0-1-interview-the-extermination-has-already-begun/

Thanks to Regen Mag for publishing the interview, PreEmptive Strike 0.1 for putting up with me, and of course myself for kicking so much ass. Click on Regen Mag's homepage for up-to-date news on underground/electronic/industrial/other stuff too, you dipshit: http://regenmag.com/

Tempel Interview

Recording The Moon Lit Our Path, getting heavier with age, bloodied snare drums, used-up SNES's, and me being a rambling, unprofessional shitstain: An interview with Ryan Wenzel of Tempel

 

 Tempel taking a break from recording, but still in full "kicking-ass-with-the-best-instrumental-metal-around" mode. Photo courtesy of the band.

Listening to many instrumental metal bands makes me feel like I’ve been injected with SARS-tainted blood from a bent, rusty needle straight into my urethra: you might say it causes me slight discomfort. Not so with Tempel, who create uncannily dense, majestic masterpieces (and I’m not just sucking them off because they agreed to do the first interview for my shitty awesome blog). Their latest album, The Moon Lit Our Path, which was released June 16^th via ProstheticRecords, gave me so much enjoyment that it ensured I would never get my apartment deposit back due to the now-nonexistent wall that was demolished by a highly pressurized burst of semen. 

Ryan Wenzel didn’t offer to cover my expenses for the collateral damage his new album indirectly caused, but he did offer an explanation as to what sets Tempel apart from their peers in the realm of vocalist-free metal. “I think there are a lot of instrumental metal bands out there that rely heavily on technical song writing or bands that are very ‘post’ or ‘sludgy’. We’ve been affiliated with the last two but not so much the technical scene,” he says. Maybe they’re not Necrophagist-technical, but their music is tighter than 72 virgins who await a suicide-bombing religious fanatic in heaven and heavier than every individual belonging to the 75% of overweight Americans combined. Give them a listen and you’ll know what I’m talking about: the tunes are eclectic to say the very least. You’ll hear hints of grindcore, black, death, post metal, and more genres than I care to mention (fuck off, I’m lazy). The ground covered in their music varies greatly, and Wenzel explains his past and current musical inspirations. “When I was younger and in high school I think Opeth, Tool and Meshuggah were the first eye opening bands that set the foundation of what kind of musician or fan of music I’d become. These day’s we are all over the map with bands. Just some examples currently in rotation are Drudkh, Genesis, Pig Destroyer, Iron Maiden [Editor’s note: two of the best bands to ever exist; anyone who name-drops Pig Destroyer in an interview automatically kicks ass, unless you’re Underoath or Five-Finger Death Suck or something, but we only interview cool musicians], Yes, and YOB,” he says. Wenzel elaborates further on their one-of-a-kind, groundbreaking style: “I think of Tempel as just an instrumental metal band, we try to cover a lot of ground but keep it cohesive in some way. We get annoyed when we’re labeled as a specific genre or scene; everyone has to label you as something."

Hearing about his dislike for people attempting to neatly pack Tempel into a genre box, which many of us are quick to do with music (and the dumbest of us enjoy doing), I didn’t feel too guilty about my descriptions of the band. I’ve always been just obscure, albeit bizarrely accurate, enough to make sure that I use more than two words: instrumental metal does loosely describe them, but truly doesn’t do them the justice they deserve. To my unenlightened friends, I describe Tempel’s albums as “the soundtracks to movies where legions of hot naked women make out with each other and then proceed to blow shit up using Gundam suits,” so it wasn’t surprising to hear Wenzel speak of film as one of the biggest driving forces behind band’s sound. “We’re big fans of movies,” he says. “[Writing Tempel’s music is] almost like making a score to an imaginary film. The melodies are the most important aspect of creating a sense of emotions without a vocalist.” His fondness for moving pictures and the impact they have on Tempel is emphasized further: “I think that shows in the style of music we make. It can be very cinematic at times,” he says. However, Tempel’s creative approach doesn’t necessarily begin with a concrete cinematic idea: that happens at the end, after climbing the steps of a monolithic temple, a journey of countless miles that begins with a single riff. “[A] song’s meaning or concept is actually the last part of the process for us,” says Wenzel. “Once the album is finished we finalize the album’s concept and create the song titles around it. We had the idea of continuing the story from the first album immediately, other than that it was all thought up towards the end. I think we try to make our music sound as full as possible. Each song has a different sound to it, as if we are trying to accomplish a different part of the story.”

Yet perhaps the most important story regarding Tempel is their own. They’ve existed in some form since 2003. Old members boned out for one reason or another, and now the only remaining musicians are Wenzel and his band mate Rich Corle, both of whom, unsurprisingly, have always been the main architects of this enigmatic group. “We've been best friends since our freshman year of high school," says Wenzel, regarding his relationship with drummer Corle. “Rich and I have a huge respect for each other’s opinions and ideas. When someone feels strongly about something we always try to compromise to get the end result to where it needs to be. We don’t have any intention of adding members or getting anyone else involved because we feel like what we’re doing is working well.” He’s right, and those greasy stains adorning my living complex, despite the massive surface area they permeate, are but miniscule indicators of Tempel’s success. The group has come a long way in their 12+ year history, eventually accomplishing more with two people than most bands do with 5 or more. “Technically we weren’t the current form of Tempel back in 2003. We had more members that eventually went their own ways. We didn’t even have a band name at that point. [I don’t] even think we had that until we were recording On the Steps of the Temple," says Wenzel.
He speaks of their first full-length, which took three years to record and perfect (significantly longer, actually, if you count everything leading up to the recording of the demos). “[Recording] On the Steps of the Temple was a big learning process on what to do and what not to do in the studio,” says Mr. Wenzel. “When the time came to work on the new album we wanted to make sure we were 100% with the songs before we started the final recording process. This meant that we flushed out the demos as much as possible and made sure the songs were there. The final versions of the album mirror the demos almost exactly, minus a few sections being trimmed down a bit,” he says.

Cover of On the Steps of the Tempel. The only mistake they made on the album was misspelling "tempel" in the title/title track.

Fast-forward to 2015: just when I thought they couldn’t make another album that would make me think twice about my distaste for instrumental metal, they released The Moon Lit Our Path, a work of artistic genius. It’s even darker, heavier, blastier, and better than it’s predecessor by leaps and bounds. Wenzel explains that that the sheer awesomeness (my words, not his) of The Moon Lit Our Path came from the learning experiences of recording the first album, the musical influences he mentioned, as well as the inevitable fact that musicians naturally progress with time. “We wanted to stray away from the post-metal sound because we kind of grew out of it ourselves,” says Wenzel. “I think our strongest material from Steps were the heavier songs. We wanted to make a heavier metal album and try to increase the dynamics and melody,” he says. “We also feel like the song writing is a lot stronger and more focused for [The Moon Lit Our Path] too. Steps was written a long time ago, so we’ve had a lot time to grow musically for this album.” The approach worked, as the new album earned significant praise (most importantly from me, but it’s worth mentioning that they were featured on Fenriz’ radio show), received mostly above average write-ups from a community of notoriously douchey reviewers, and secured Tempel on my list of favorites. 


Rich Corle wasn’t available for comment, so Mr. Wenzel recounts how, while recording the new album, Corle brought the heaviness in the drumming department. “Rich hit the drums so hard that he cracked all his crash cymbals and one of my own by the end of the recording,” says Wenzel. “We recorded the album in song order, so I’m pretty sure there’s a different crash cymbal on the last 3 songs. The snare drum head was also beaten to a pulp and there were specks of blood on it,” he says. Tempel put their heart, soul, and, more literally, their blood and sweat into the creation of The Moon Lit Our Path. The result is a flawless victory, complete with a Sub Zero-style, spinal-column-removing fatality of an album closer. 

Cover of The Moon Lit Our Path. Everything about the album is perfect in every way, and there isn't a typo to be seen.

Speaking of video games (which I so often do), does Wenzel share my hobby in electronic gaming? “I used to play video games quite a bit,” he says. He recounts owning both a Sega Genesis and a Super Nintendo, the latter of which received much more attention (also something the two of us have in common; it’s an objectively superior system, get over it, the Genesis pales in comparison to the game selection and overall awesomeness of the SNES). He said he played his SNES so much, that one day it just stopped working. “[That] was a sad day,” he says. Though I have no way of knowing for sure, he’s probably, and hopefully, fighting back tears as he recounts the tale of when his beloved system finally had enough.

Tempel standing by some cacti, one of which may or may not be the grave marker for his dead Super Nintendo. Photo courtesy of the band.

Mr. Wenzel and I may have a mutual love for video games in common, yet, unlike me, he’s grown up and moved on: he has responsibilities and an actual life. “Working on [the new] album, my job and my family priorities have pretty much eliminated [time for video games],” he says. “I do however play some kid friendly games with my son,” he says. When he does have time playing video games, he mentions some of the newer ones he’s been into: “Some of my favorite games of all time are Bioshock, Portal, Batman Arkham series, Street Fighter IV and the Uncharted series,” says Wenzel. [Editor’s note: though he made no such statements, and the following is borderline libel, I'm going to speculate that he also loves the Megaman X series, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Chrono Trigger, and every Shin Megami Tensei game in the series, especially Persona 3: FES].
 

If you haven’t listened to Tempel yet after reading this far into the article, you’re more than likely an asshole, and more than likely wondering: what’s their trick to success, and, ultimately, why is there a line around the block of people waiting to get their erections drained at the hospital (and a worldwide, exponential epidemic of female crotch moisture)? It’s much simpler than I thought: honest guys making honest music from the heart, first and foremost. The rest is all a byproduct of dedication and their love of making music that rules. “We always will be music fans creating music that we’d like to listen to or would enjoy ourselves,” says Wenzel. “Thanks to everyone who’s helped support us in any way. We just like to create music and anyone that enjoys what we do, and listens to it is such an honor to us,” he says. “The success or positive feedback is all a bonus from there. We never thought any of this would happen. When we released the first album on Bandcamp in 2012 everything that happened after was just insanity. It all still seems odd to me.” Rest assured, Mr. Wenzel: It doesn’t to me.—Nuko Kapao

Click on everything below/get their shit:
https://www.facebook.com/Tempelofficialband
https://twitter.com/tempelband
https://tempelofficial.bandcamp.com/
http://prostheticrecords.com/

Click below if you want to read about them in German, because, for some reason, it's the only Wikipedia page about them:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempel_%28Band%29