Basically what came about on the first disc was we were making our music with keyboards in the background the whole time but with Towers of Avarice we didn’t have a keyboard player so Mikey, Troy, and I would push more weight on ourselves to make it a much better cd and then add keyboards later. After we got done with all the tracks and hearing it we decided that we didn’t want to put keys on there because it would destroy the vibe we had on it. We wanted a cold dark vibe for Towers of Avarice because that’s how the band was feeling at the time with record labels and just the business in general. Your music comes out the way you feel and when we heard the music come out without the keyboards we knew that this was exactly what we wanted with Towers.

Oh yea, absolutely. How it worked out for Metamorphosis and Towers of Avarice, we just got into the studio and just said, “Anybody got a part?” and we would just try to grow dynamically from there. Troy and I did all the writing for that process, I would come in with a riff and then say “add this after it” so when we did Towers of Avarice we must have written about eighty minutes worth of material but there was a lot of crap there (laughs). It would sound too technical or too forced, it didn’t sound like it was flowing for the vocalist so we kinda bailed outta that a lot of the material. We just wanted the music to flow and have a creative vibe so whenever we went into the studio and whoever had a part we would try to gain momentum from that.

A long ass time, that’s all I can say. Towers took, at least musically, a little over a year and then you have to add the lyrics in on top of that. It was a two year process just in writing. The thing about our music that I’m sure you can sense is that we don’t repeat parts over and over again. There’s still a lot of Prog Metal bands that go back to having a chorus and all that and that’s what kind of separates us with our sound. We don’t stick to a game plan. Maybe on some songs like Eyes of Denial and The Subterranean, since they’re shorter but any long one we have a ton of different parts. If we were to write all of that out and extend it we would have easily had eighty minutes worth of stuff but that’s just not our sound and how we go about doing Zero Hour. I can understand people wanting over seventy minutes worth of material but we don’t have a home studio, we go to a real place to get a really good sound and that costs a lot of money. That’s just another avenue that we have to go through, our production is also very important to us too. If we’re gonna bust our ass writing this music the way we like it we sure as hell want it to sound the way we want it too as well. I know some guys that get better budgets than us and go record the drums somewhere and then take it home and record guitar and bass tracks then take it somewhere to get it mixed. We though, do everything in the studio so we’re paying by the hour at all times.

What happened was the singer Kirk was always cornering us to do a project with him and he was on us for two years straight and we kept saying, “Yea that’s cool, we’ll get together, whatever man” just kinda blowing him off. Then he cornered us at a wedding and said, “Look man, I’ll pay for the recordings and whatever else, I just feel that we should do this.” So we said sure and that we’d do it and things like that. We’re also into different bands like Meshuggah, we really like them, and Fear Factory and Mudvayne who are different bands from what Zero Hour is all about. Zero Hour is what we want to do technically but it’s always good to do different types of music as well. We decided to go into the studio and record some songs and then all of a sudden we got a real big buzz out here in the Bay Area, we were like number two on the local radio and getting so many people coming out to see our shows which we thought was crazy that so many people were digging this. I mean, we were wearing the outfits and changed our names cos we don’t want people to think that this will be a Zero Hour II or conflict with it, we wanted it to be totally something else. So people were reacting really well to all this and we were thinking about if we should get rid of the costumes but everybody told us no, we had to keep them because that was our vibe and things like that so that’s what we’ve been doing, having a lot of fun with Death Machine. Yesterday we played a gig at Cd Warehouse and also a Halloween show and things have just been going really great for that band. We have fun with it. It’s not anything that conflicts with Zero Hour at all. Right now, we’re still waiting for Erik to do his vocal parts, Troy, Mikey, and I have been done with our music tracks since March. We understand that Erik has to go through a long process but us sitting down and doing nothing it just feels terrible. It was good to write some other music and just do it.

It’s just fun man. I guess you could put it as a full time band in some ways because Erik takes awhile (laughs). If Erik was fast then yeah you would say that but right now we’ve just been playing a lot of shows with Death Machine and since we’ve been done with our parts for Zero Hour since March and I don’t think Erik will be done for another few more months so that’s just how its working out at the moment.

Death Machine will never interfere with Zero Hour that’s how I see it. The only things that can interfere with Zero Hour would be if a member took off, if someone just had enough or if we were at a point where we needed to change something. We still love Zero Hour very much and we love doing Death Machine because it is so much fun, we’ve already begun writing for the next Death Machine album as well. It’s good to get a nice hype from different people too because it will also help Zero Hour out. A lot of people that come see Death Machine don’t even know we’re in Zero Hour and when we tell them about it they start going to buy the cds and I think that’s great. Prog Metal is a tough market man let’s face it. Some people think we’re just doing Death Machine to push product or something like that and yea it sells ok but we just have fun doing it and we still love doing technical stuff. I even do New Age Jazz stuff off to the side, we just love music!

It’s tough to say where we are with Death Machine right now because it is so brand new. It hasn’t even come out in Europe yet (editors note: this was done before the release date but it IS out now in Europe) but in North America it’s doing pretty well but it’s still hard to say what we’re going to do with Death Machine on that route. With Zero Hour it has been tough to get some tours going but the name has been growing a lot over the last couple of years so I’m thinking that when the new album comes out we’ll have our opportunities to do something like that. The scene is also getting better for all of metal, I mean hell, Evergrey got onto MTV2, that gives hope to everybody and Evergrey is a great band. Hopefully this can open up some doors for Zero Hour as well.

We wanted to do the whole album. There was a lot of ideas, Ken Goldman was thinking of maybe making a graphic novel of the whole storyline or even doing a whole video of us playing live doing Towers of Avarice and use clips that pertain to the story but that’s just too much money it would have been a hard sell. I think we would have lost money for doing something like that.

No. The material on Metamorphosis came out a long time ago and now its out for people to finally get a chance to have it. We only made 2100 copies of the self titled and they were gone really quick. Every time we’d go out to Europe or play Prog Power or other festivals people would always be saying, “Hey is there any way I can get a copy of the self title,” and I’d always end up telling them ‘Sorry’ and so then they’d ask if we were gonna re-release it so after awhile we just decided we should go ahead and re-release it and put extra tracks on there if we could get the extra money to mix the whole album. We ran out of money, that’s why we couldn’t have a full length before on the self titled. It’s nice to have it out now as a full length album as that’s the way it should have been in the beginning.

Hmmm. That’s a really good question. I’m a huge Tool fan, and a fan of Meshuggah so much as well that would be great. There’s too many bands. I like Nevermore, I like Mudvayne, and Killswitch Engage, I love that band. Even Lamb of God as well. But I guess you’d have to go a bigger tour to get some more fans so I’m thinking Tool would be fantastic. Dream Theater, they started things going really well for the genre and that would be fantastic too. There’s plenty of bands we’d play out with.

Yea they will be on the album and they do have names. Erik writes all the lyrics and I don’t know if he was really concrete with them at the time. At Prog Power he was with those two songs but in Europe we did another new song on top of those but I don’t know if he was concrete with that one at the time. (At this time Jasun goes on an epic quest to find the contract that has all the song titles on it. Keep reading because shortly after the next few questions he finds it)

I don’t drink personally and my brother has a couple of beers here and there and Mikey is the same way. The guy who really goes off the deep end is Erik, he was barely walking at the end of the night. (laughs) To everyone it’s their own thing, and everyone there was partying pretty well. I would say the person most wasted at Prog Power was our singer, God it was funny as hell too.

Definitely still playing music hopefully with both bands. It’s hard to say right now, ten years… Also to think what kind of music we’ll be writing at that time too that’s a tough one. I don’t know yet but we sure look forward to seeing what happens.

I would say it’s in between both. There’s definitely some cool heavy parts in there and I think it will also be a little more accessible for the listener. For the people that did like Metamorphosis and thought that Towers was too cold, I think that they will totally dig this cd cos there’s a lot of really nice clean tone lush parts in there and my brother is doing some really kick ass fretless bass and we have a cinematic piece in there too. This album will easily be our best one no doubt about it. Ok I did find the song titles man here they are: Shallow World, Incision, The Savage Mind, Divine Light, Defy the Day, and Ascension.

Oh yea. One of the tunes is eighteen minutes long, it always seems to work out that way.

(laughs) That song is easily our best song too to date, I totally dig it.

De-Evolution is what it’s gonna be called. I’ll give you a sample of the songs to prove that we have tracked our parts. Here’s a taste of it so you can be one of the first people that can say something about it. (Jasun then proceeds to play Shallow World which is pure Zero Hour all the way. Containing a sharp biting riff with a killer guitar tone and some tight and impressive drum work, I would rank this up there with Strategem and The Towers of Avarice in terms of sound and quality. Because my phone isn’t a hundred dollar super phone I couldn’t hear the bass lines too clearly to comment on them though.)

Thanks man I’m glad you dig it. I’m gonna hit you up with this one, this is more a Nevermore sounding one. (It sounds more modern in terms of the guitar tone but not dirty crapped out modern like that term usually implies. The riff is balls out heavy and then breaks into what sounds like a perfect synchronized headbanging or mosh part followed by a killer run on the guitar)

Yea, some of the songs will be a bit more modern and some of them will be really progressive.

I think so too, we’ll see. It’s gonna be an awesome disc we’re really excited about it whenever the hell it comes out it’s gonna be really tight. I wanted to give you a little taste so you can let people know that we’re still alive and going.

(laughs) Mike is a really cool cat, he might be a little quiet when you first meet him but just start chatting it up with him and he’s one of the funniest guys you could meet, a really nice guy. He’s probably laughing in his brain somewhere about something too, who knows what Mikey’s up too? He cracks me up though.

That happens quite a bit actually. We used to work at this comic book store and one of us would go to the back and the other one would come out and when people would finally see us together they’d go, “Wow! I just thought you changed our outfit really fast or something.” The Prog fans are actually pretty good they keep up on us but no one who’s ever seen us they question it a bit.

All I would say is that if you want guys that really bust their ass to put out what they feel is really kick ass material to themselves to check us out. We really love the music that we do and we’re really passionate about that and if you can feel what we are feeling than it’s totally worth checking out. We don’t half ass anything at all, we’re very meticulous and tedious with every part, we want songs to flow perfectly. Whenever we write a song its never like, “Oh let’s just throw this part in there so we can get to the next one,” each part is well written out in our eyes, we take a lot of pride in what we do.

Yea, “What’s my brothers hobbies?” This is a good one, my brothers hobbies are: His cell phone with his girlfriend, going out with his girlfriend, hanging out with his girlfriend, and then playing music with the band, how’s that sound? (laughs) Back at the time of the self title, Troy was asked one time by this magazine what my hobbies were and I had a girlfriend at the time and he said, “Jay works out, plays music, and is with his girlfriend all the time.” I got shit from that all the time too. On a radio station in France, on the air, I got asked, “Isn’t your hobby being with your girlfriend and things like that?” That shit went with me forever but now the roles have reversed and I mean totally reversed, the cat is on the phone twenty four seven. That’s cool and I’m with somebody right now too and it’s great but it’s not like THAT at all (laughs).

Just wait for the next Zero Hour cd to come out, De-Evolution it will be fantastic. It will be out next year sometime and I’m thinking more later than early but it will be worth the wait. You have to take into consideration that the labels always seem to take six months just to get your product out there. Death Machine will be writing for another cd and please check out our new disc, it just came out and I think you’ll totally dig it. It’s really heavy and some people have been saying that it sounds like Zero Hour in some areas too. Night’s Pulse, I just finished tracking that, for my jazz, new-age cd. All that needs to be done for that is the bass tracks and will hopefully be out next year as well. I’ll also be co-producing the band Artillery Hell, it’s one of my guitar students bands and they are awesome. I’m looking forward to getting them into the studio. There’s a lot of music to look forward to in the near future.