Scott LePage had a method for finding gnarly new electric guitar tones and it worked just fine, even if it was unsustainable in the long term.
The Polyphia guitarist says you can hear the fruits of his labours on the Texan instrumentalist’s breathtaking new album, Be Not Afraid. Those will be the guitar sounds that might sound as though there is something miraculously wrong with LePage’s plugin’s presets, or that – and you just can’t rule this out – the fabric of the time-space continuum itself was being rent asunder just as he pressed ‘record’.
All LePage needed to find these sounds was a bottle of the good stuff and a little me time. He’d the phone on silent, mute the intercom, adjust ambient lighting to taste, then pour out a glass of something amber-coloured and 100 per cent proof.
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“Man, a couple of years ago, before I moved, I would sit in my room, and have a bottle of scotch next to me, and I would just tweak guitar tones, and try to just experiment with tone matching by myself,” says LePage, joining his Polyphia bandmate, Tim Henson, and MusicRadar over Zoom, in an interview you read in full here. “So that’s where the heavy stuff came from.”
But some of the guitar sounds we hear on Be Not Afraid exist outside of what we understand as being heavy. Some of them started it as a hypothesis that Polyphia’s mad scientist then tested with some rigorous experiments.
“The weird noises and stuff was just me being, like, ‘I wonder what a wah pedal would sound like with a guitar tone that is pitched down 17 semitones, and the EQ on the high-end of the spectrum is boosted to shit because of the low pitching, the compensation, and what would that sound like if I did that here?’” he says
That definitely sounded like something, only LePage wasn’t so sure that it sounded like music – at least not at first.
“It just gives you that gurgly, weird, hissy fucked-up sound,” he explains. “And it’s stuff like that, where you think, ‘What is the use case for something like that? Let me just experiment and try and see what happens.’”
The chances are that Polyphia will find a use for these sounds. Be Not Afraid is this propulsive, cacophonous assault on the senses, the sound of the unrelenting deconstruction of the 21st-century progressive-metal idiom as filtered through Henson and LePage’s quicksilver production sensibilities.
One minute the vibe is 3am at The Warehouse in Chicago, where house music got its name, the next it’s Adam Curtis’s HypernNormalisation being screened at 1.5x, with Meshuggah-level chug as musical punctuation marks.
There are a couple moments on the record that freak me out a little bit
Scott LePage
“There are a couple moments on the record that freak me out a little bit,” admits LePage. “We were trying to come up with a transition from one song to another, and Tim, called me up, and he’s like, ‘Hey, uh, here’s the prompt: Can you make something that sounds like the devil throwing a tantrum?’ And I was like, ‘You know, I think I have access to enough freaky sounds on the guitar and whatever I have on the pedalboard today that I could make that sound.’”
Henson says Be Not Afraid is the quintessence of Polyphia. There are no guests. There is a theme, a story being told, with the song titles referencing the bible. Christ is on the cover. There are moments of ecstasy and bliss, but then when the inevitable comedown arrives, Henson wanted it to be more brutal than anything they did before.
“The sound design on this record is so insane,” says Henson. “There are so many moments where it was just, like, ‘How can we make sounds that literally tear your mind apart?’”
One of the first steps is Henson will call LePage with his instructions and LePage will consult his rig and see what he can come up with.
“Prompt isn’t the right word,” says LePage.
“Yeah, it’s just a quick description, but…” says Henson.
But still, this was Henson’s prompt. It was near the end of Deny The Flesh, after all the samples, after its triumphant section, he needed something evil.
“I called Scott,” says Henson. “And I was like, ‘Okay. You’ve successfully denied the flesh, Satan is absolutely fucking pissed, and he is throwing an insane tantrum. And it’s just him throwing everything that he’s got at you, right before it goes into, Devil Get Behind Me. Right?’ And so, more so than a prompt, this is the storytelling of the record.”
And LePage had just the thing. It was that “gurgly, weird, hissy fucked-up sound”. It turned out useful after all.
“Like, okay, well, I know that sound sounds like, hissy and weird,” says LePage. “Maybe that is the use case for something like this. And sure enough, it worked. I did spend a lot of time sitting down trying to make sounds, but I think all of the ones that we really ended up using on the record were just stuff that just came on a whim because that’s where the feeling of, like, Oh shit, I think I got something cool, let me press record!’ kinda happened during those moments.”
Be Not Afraid is out now via Rise Records. Read more about the making of the album: Polyphia’s radical guitar gospel according to Tim Henson and Scott LePage.
