Meshuggah is a band that have certainly lived up to their name in their near twenty year existence. Meshuggah, Yiddish for "crazy", have embarked on a journey that has seen them embark on two tours with Tool and a jaunt as a co-headliner for the second stage on Ozzfest, bringing their unique brand of progressive death metal to more U.S. fans than most European bands could ever hope for. Now with the release of "Catch Thirty Three", a one song concept album, Meshuggah are writing the next chapter in their amazing tale

Tomas: I don't know. There is not fundamental meaning why we chose the name, it was way back, like the late 80's. Jens found it in a dictionary or something and just thought it sounded cool and after that, it just stuck with us really. So there's no profound, underlying meaning as to why we chose that name. For the meaning of it and especially what we were doing in the early years, it kind of suited the band, I guess.

Tomas: Well, yeah, at least initially, before they got a grip of what it was we wanted to do with this album. It wasn't really written for live use. It's like an experiment for us and it's something we've been thinking of doing for ten years and now we finally felt like doing it, it felt like the right time to do it. So it was something that we wanted out of the system, so to speak; a one track album, even though there's titles on it, those are more like chapters of a book, there's not really different songs, as you may have noticed, if you skip in between songs, it doesn't make sense. So it's definitely meant to be listened to as a whole. I guess a lot of fans were kind of confused at first, but after a couple months there was a big difference. I mean, you look at the discussion boards and all that, people are really getting into it.

Tomas: Maybe. It would be really hard; it would take a lot of time to rehearse the whole thing, to get it all down, but it would have to be a special thing, as you say, like maybe do four or five shows at the same place and do it as a theme of sorts, do just the album and nothing else. But we have no idea when or where that would happen.

Tomas: Yeah, there's plans for it, but we're recording a lot of this run, but unfortunately, we don't really have all of the equipment or the means to get the equipment right now to really do it properly. So we'll see how much material and what kind of material we get on this tour and if that doesn't work out, it will be after the next release unless we start touring again. We really want to record and make the sound really good, like bring out maybe Pro Tools or whatever and record with six or seven cameras and do maybe three, four, five shows in a row. We don't have the means to do that now, but we're still recording quite a lot at shows, but so far, we only have a single camera and that's not going to work, so we're thinking of borrowing cameras from all around the camp, from the opening bands and all that, and get guys to film a few shows. So we'll see.

Tomas: Yeah, it's great exposure, both with Ozzfest, more so with Tool, maybe, 'cause we played every night for between ten and thirty thousand people, so that was great exposure. The Ozzfests also, of course. You get a diverse audience as you say; it's not a dedicated crowd, but you gain a lot of fans that way, so it's definitely a good thing to do for any band.

Tomas: Actually, earlier than that; it was in '91.

Tomas: Well, that thing was kind of blown out of proportion in a way. I mean, it was a long time back and the human body is good at healing. Fredrik was the more unfortunate one, 'cause he cut his long finger off on his left hand which he used to play guitar, so it's now the same length as his index finger and they had to staple it at an angle like that so he could play, but I guess it took him seven, eight months maybe, to kind of fully recover and then another year and a half additionally to feel as comfortable with the guitar again, 'cause he had to get used to that finger not reaching as far. I cut my fingers up kinda bad, but I was gone for maybe four, five months before I could play without it hurting. The ironic thing about that was that it happened in the same year, so we didn't really play during that year, like '92, I guess it would have been, we didn't really rehearse or anything. But apart from that, we were just kind of biding our time and healing up.

Tomas: I wouldn't really know. I guess it's a mix of things we grew up with, ranging from stuff like Earth, Wing And Fire through rock fusion, jazz stuff to metal to all sorts of bands like King Crimson, I guess and Rush. But mainly, the strongest influence we have is still the metal that we grew up with and that will always be there, the kind of Meshuggah twist, if you will to things is more something that just came to be 'cause we all wanted something different. It's not really a way of writing music that we've heard anyone else do, but of course we've been inspired, especially through adolescence and we've been inspired by bands doing things their own way, but not necessarily taking their way of doing things.

Tomas: It was mainly how we wrote the album; we had like two hours of music, two hours of riffs and drums, guitar parts… it's kind of weird; it takes a lot of time to explain it, but to put it simply, it would have taken us forever to record the drums in the regular way for this album. All the parts on the album have been changed over and over again; it would mean I'd have to learn something, go in and record it, maybe the week after or two weeks later, relearn it slightly different, re-record it and at the end of the week, maybe toss it and not even use it. And also, with we wanted with this album, the programmed drums suited it just fine. It actually wouldn't have sounded the way it does if we had used live drums; it's just really super steady, like almost emotionless drums basically supporting what we see as a more guitar driven album. Also to break the taboo of being a metal band, especially like us, I guess, where the drumming has always been kind of prominent, kind of just go the opposite way. There's a lot of bands that do it but claim they don't, why would you do that, you know? I mean, we put a lot of effort and a lot of work into the programming as well; I think it came out great. For what we wanted with this album, it suited it very well.

Tomas: Most of the ideas came from the director. He had a lot of cool ideas and we kind of just put everything in his hands and let him do whatever he wanted. It turned out pretty cool.

Tomas: I'm not entirely sure.

Tomas: Yeah. I'm just the drummer. (laughter) I go where the bus goes and someone said it's canceled. I'm not exactly sure why at this point; we just heard it a few days ago.

Tomas: We were going to exchange that actually, 'cause it's one person's point of view and not really a biography; it's his view on things and so we're going to exchange that. The reason why we haven't is that for years and years, we've been meaning to revamp the whole page; it's going to be a totally different home page and it's just that we've tried with several different guys and they don't get what we mean, so it hasn't worked out and that's why that old stuff is still on there and that biography especially is one of those things where it's one person's opinion of things, not ours, 'cause we didn't write it.

Tomas: All Right, man.