Altsounds - The Arusha Accord - Interview with Luke Williams

The Arusha Accord – Holla at me. Who are you and what noise do you make in the band?
Haha, ‘holla’ at you? .. in England we say ‘good morning’! .. I’m Luke, and I play bass in The Arusha Accord.

Congratulations on releasing the EP 'Nightmares Of The Ocean', it sounds pretty awesome and I'm not even just being polite to make conversation.
Thank you .. appreciate that

Track one is 'The New Face Of Revenge'; paint me a photo-fit picture like on Crimewatch with but mere words of her majesty's English of what said face looks like.
You mean describe the song? lol ... well ... musically, it was written well over a year ago. It was one of our first songs to be completely finalised after a good 18 months of scrapping almost everything, and so, as gay as it sounds, theres a huge amount of senitment attached to it, for me anyway. Like most of arusha's songs, it's a bit of a rollercoaster, in which the time signatures are liquid and the music ranges from sheer brutality to pure bliss ... random fact; there’s actually 250 tempo changes in that recording! ...

Your MySpace page is pretty pimped-up a-la-Tim Westwood, although I don't see ANY chrome. Do you feel that it's still an important way of connecting with the band's fans even though we know that social networking is officially running out of steam?
Ha no, no chrome ... Tim Westwood is an arse.

I’d say that myspace is now quite possibly the easiest promotional and networking tool for any band. The fact that anyone, anywhere in the world, can listen to your music and be updated on any news and gigs etc, is just amazing and I don’t think that should ever be underestimated. We’ve always taken the running and upkeep of our myspace very seriously (43,000 friends and counting .. chamone!) and to be honest, we wouldn’t be where we are now without it.

So, SikTh are dead. RIP. Are you here to dance on their grave and to carry on where they left off? You seem to do a good job of it whether it's intentional or not.
Not at all. No-one could ever touch on what Sikth achieved. They inspired a generation and took music to places it had never been before … they’ll live forever and rightly so.

I suppose it’s human nature to compare something new to the closest thing we know, so in that sense I can understand that comparison, but, as flattering as it is to be compared such an inspirational outfit, I want to nip this in the bud and say that we’re not Sikth, we’re The Arusha Accord, and we do things very differently … I have no doubt that that will become more apparent as time goes on.

There are about 5million metal bands in my postcode alone, why should I listen to you over them? I'd appreciate it if you could slot the word 'panda' into your answer somewhere please for extra awesomeness-points.
Lol ok. Believe it or not, our musical roots aren’t metal. I’m personally very poorly listened in the genre and am not a great fan of a lot of it. Musically, it’s taken us a couple of years to progress into ‘tech metal’ from very textured, musical, Tool-y background. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why our sound is a bit unusual. Panda.

You have a few pretty respectable shows coming up this summer, silly question but how are you feeling about them? What's The Arusha Accord's plan of attack?
We were writing and practicing alot this material for two and a half years before we ever had an audience. When we first moved from the practice room to the stage we thought it was all about playing everything perfectly, note for note, so obviously there was little stage presence. We quickly realized that people respond to the emotions you portray and not that you hit every note! So our live performance has really matured with time. We’ve now done about 30 shows and our live show is becoming increasingly Dillinger-esque ;)

Kudos to you for the super technical music that you write, but mathcore can surely only be taken so far can't it? What's next?
Ha cheers … I actually completely dis-agree. The beauty of this genre is that it can go where-ever it wants to go. There’s no rulebook or pre-conceptions of any kind. We’re not confined to rigid song structures, 4/4 or to any other type of song model. There are infinite combinations of time signatures / poly-meters / poly-rhythm’s and infinite ways of arranging them. The possibilities are just amazing.

This is a genre which hasn’t even been touched upon yet! .. so who knows what’s next or where we'll end up. We’ll just wait and see what gets written .. it’s exciting.

'Nightmares Of The Ocean', what's the title about? Is each song about a different nightmare that Billy Ocean has had layered over a delicious meaty slab of mathcore? Or not? Probably not
Nightmares is a story of a man lost at sea who meets his end at the hands of what he fears most, we’ve tried to create quite a visual story through the lyrics and we worked the vocals to it with that in mind. The other tracks were always written to allow whoever listens to them to attach their own meaning. Although we’ve put a lot about ourselves into them they’ve been left quite open in terms of theme. The death of thieves was written as if from the perspective of someone who feels everyone is out to get them criticizing and staring down at everything they do, and them just wanting to be left alone. I guess a lot of people can relate to songs like that probably even Billy Ocean

What three unsigned bands do I need to listen to and why? Don't take the easy route and name your mates bands please!
Haha … umm, tricky question. I’m quite difficult to impress so I’m not going to lie and list three unsigned bands that I don’t particularly care for. So, instead, I’ll give you the name of one band who I was genuinely impressed by: ‘No Consequence’. We played with them in Bournemouth ... they’re techy death metal with some lovely melodic parts, check them out!

If somehow on the quest to develop and to progress mathcore you stumbled upon a new scale, what would you call it and why?
Badger Snuff Jazz .. because our guitarist hates references to badgers (because he looks like one) and snuff (no idea why!) and this will really piss him off when he reads it! teehee

The Arusha Accord….. thank you and good luck with everything!
Thank you … same to you.