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Interviews
Forlorn Path - Yuriy Garnaev
21/06/13 || Pr0nogo
Forlorn Path is a blackened death/doom outfit from New Jersey. As I mentioned in my review of “Man’s Last Portrait”, their debut full-length, they’re pretty fuckin’ brilliant at making music. The band’s guitarist and songwriter, Yuriy Garnaev, sat down with Pr0nogo to tell him (and Global Domination) all about the art of making music in a fairly-lengthy interview.
Global Domination: Hello, Yuriy. Ready to get this started?
Yuriy: Let’s do it!
You three dropped your debut, “Man’s Last Portrait”, this past January. Since not everyone knows how awesome it is yet, what can you tell us about the record?
Well, it’s our first full-length album and we’ve been recording it over pretty much the good part of 2012. We recorded it ourselves and mixed it with Rob Torres, who’s also responsible for Dystrophy. We had it mastered by Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios, and he’s done work with bands like Opeth.
What were the driving factors behind making “Man’s Last Portrait”? What gave you inspiration to craft the sound of the record?
I guess it’s an attempt to express ourselves. I don’t think I’m very good at expressing myself with words, so it’s an attempt to have that outlet for expression, and also to just create something that we want to hear.
I hear a lot of different elements on “Man’s Last Portrait”, from the orchestral elements to the keyboard/piano introduction to the sheer amount of genre-blending you do with the sounds that you guys have. It gives kind of an eclectic feel, while still sounding really well-polished. What made you guys want to be so varied?
We’ve got a variety of influences in the band. I myself listen to a few different styles of music, not just metal, so I wanted to incorporate many different elements into the mix. I think a very important aspect of that approach is that we wanted the album to be something that takes you on a journey, and goes through very different states of mind, of feeling, and of emotion. It was supposed to allow you to be in one place while the album goes into different sections and parts of itself. I find that if you’re listening to an album where it tends to just stay in one place, it’ll end up sounding boring to me. I didn’t want that with this album.
How did you feel about it being your first record? You’ve got other releases, but this is your debut full-length – what people are going to think of as a “first impression” of sorts. Did that stress you guys out at all?
The recording process was actually very, very stressful, because it was our first time recording anything of this scale, and we were doing a lot of it by ourselves. I mean, pretty much up everything until the end was done with little outside help, and we were learning things on the way. Our other guitarist, Ivan, used to work at a studio a couple years before he joined the band, so he had some background in that department. There were a lot of bumps in the road even so, with delays and stuff like that, and we were also on a very limited budget. It was a very stressful process, but luckily I think everything that we ended up producing belongs on the album, and everything came out just the way we wanted it to.
Was there anything that you originally set out to do with this record that you didn’t end up being able to accomplish?
It’s really hard to say. I mean, I’m not sure what exactly I was trying to accomplish originally, I just wanted to create something and hopefully there would be people who enjoy listening to it. Hopefully, those people can connect to the record. So far, we’ve been getting some good feedback, and it’s pretty amazing to hear that people are really enjoying the album. So I would say it was an overall success, as far as I’m concerned. I guess you could always say that you could have better production quality on some level, or maybe that something else could be improved, but for what it is I’m quite happy with how it came out and I think whatever we managed to pull off this time is something that we’ll keep in mind when we start writing and recording the next album.
What was songwriting like? How did you guys decide to tackle that?
For the songs, I tend to write a lot of the stuff on my own. I just sit down at home with my guitar and a glass of wine, and just play, and see what comes out. I’ll start writing for the guitar at first, before writing for other instruments as well, and sometimes nothing comes out of the whole process. Other times, you get a creative burst and get a whole lot done at once. When it’s ready, I bring these ideas to the other guys and get their feedback and thoughts on it, and we kind of go from there and try to take what we decide is the best stuff. We make it as good as it can possibly be.
So you’d say that you played a pretty significant role, with regards to songwriting?
Yeah. It do make sure that I get everybody’s input, though, so it’s not just me writing it. The whole band has an input, and the whole band knows all about the song before it’s done.
Now you share guitar duties with Ivan. What kind of collaborations did you guys do to make the structuring happen?
We have jam locations where we do the same thing that I do at home, except we’re together. There were a couple parts that we came up with during that time. For example, in the song “Ghosts”, there’s a slow part in the middle where Dave does some growls and Ivan does a kind of leading guitar thing and I’m doing the melody. That part, Ivan came up with on the spot while we were jamming together, but for the most part, he focused on the sound engineering process – you know, trying to get everything to sound good during the recording. He played a huge role in that. Ivan also helped with the keyboard sounds and a lot of the sound-related stuff that the rest of us didn’t know how to do.
How do you guys make the lyrics? Does the entire band write, or do you leave that up to Dave?
That was actually probably the most collaborative part of the album. We each had several songs that Dave and I co-wrote, mostly because his English is not too good. In addition, our old vocalist, Alex, helped us write the lyrics. We also had some external help from an author and poet that we know, so we had four different people working on the lyrics, and of course we spent time making sure that it fit the themes of the album overall.
There you go, answering my questions before I ask them. What themes are present in “Man’s Last Portrait”? What are the songs about, at their heart?
Lyrically, the album deals a lot with topics of personal loss and sorrow and grief. It’s a pretty depressing album, I guess, but it also has a take on the situation of the world we live in. Some of it indirectly talks about the concept of consumerism. For some of the less personal topics, we try not to always talk about them directly. We try to use some abstract imagery to present what we mean.
I noticed that while watching the lyric video for “Words Only Winds Can Speak”. Now, here’s a question coming from my pedantic side: what’s the deal with the drummer situation? You guys don’t have a drummer as far as Metal Archives is concerned, but there are four of you in the picture and three of you in the lineup. Where did you pull James Applegate from?
We’ve had quite a few lineup changes over the past couple of years, so that’s probably why there are different pictures and lineups listed. Right now, the band consists of Dave, Ivan, and me. James is the one who did drums on the very first EP, and he also did a lot of work on this album. He did session drums for us, and we may have him play drums live for us if we can work out our schedules together. James has music school and his other band, Exorbidance, so there are bound to be some conflicts with the scheduling. But yeah, the lineup changes are probably the big reason for all of the conflicting data.
Do you guys have any plans to get a more permanent addition to the band, for the drum duties?
It depends on how things are progressing in the future. If we can get everything in order and find time to play shows where it works for all of us, than we would certainly look for a permanent drummer – especially since it’d mean that we could play live as a full band again, and we haven’t been able to do that for a long time.
What’s your favourite song on “Man’s Last Portrait”?
That’s a tough question. I suppose it’s probably “Ghosts”. I would say that it does vary based on my mood at the time, but I think “Ghosts” probably is my favourite track. I gravitate towards its slower and more melodic side, but you know, it’s hard to say for sure because one day I’ll prefer that song, and the other day I’ll favour another one entirely, and the other day I won’t want to listen to anything from that album, haha.
The album is over an hour long, which, while I’m completely fine with, must have been an intentional decision – especially since most full-length records only last for about forty minutes, if you’re lucky. Why’d you guys choose to make it lengthier than the average metal LP?
We were just trying to release a complete album. We weren’t really looking at the standard size or format. This is just what ended up coming together during the creative process, and that’s what we decided to release. Some of the songs are pretty long, but we didn’t want to leave out any of the tracks we decided on. Everything that we wanted to release is on the album, no matter how long it ended up being.
I think that the pacing suits the lengthier songs. How important was having ambiance in these tracks – being able to create details in the songs without making them terribly obvious?
I think it’s really important to include different elements. I know a lot of people have negative things to say about using keyboards, for example, or a lot of clean instruments, but the way I see it is that if it works and creates the right atmosphere, then there’s nothing you can say against it.
What I really like is how varied and different each song sounds, even though you guys have a lot of songs and each one is fairly long in and of itself, save the intro. It’s obvious a lot of thought went into “Man’s Last Portrait”. Have a lot of other people noticed it? How have the reviews been?
Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of reviews coming up online and in a couple of magazines, plus the things that people just tell us in a less formal manner. I think a lot of people really did capture the very things we were trying to convey in their reviews, which is absolutely awesome. A lot of listeners did notice different details, like the keyboards and the subtle acoustic sections or the specific sections of the album that we want them to notice. It’s absolutely excellent that people are actually hearing the things that we wanted them to hear.
It definitely sounds rewarding. Where do you think the band will go, now that you’ve dropped your first full-length and it’s getting good press?
That’s really hard to say, but we’ll see how things go. One thing we can say for certain is that I definitely plan to keep writing music, and I want to create more things that people will be able to listen to and really enjoy, and hopefully improve upon the things that need to improve from the last time. We’ll see how it goes, but like I said, it’s too early to really tell for sure.
Do you guys have any major plans to support “Man’s Last Portrait” scheduled – tours, videos, the works?
At this point in time, again, it’s kind of hard to say since we are all ridiculously busy with other things in life. I’m working on a degree right now, and Ivan is trying to get himself established in this country, and it’s really difficult trying to support yourself while you’re doing music at the same time. Once things kind of settle down a little bit, we would definitely like to do some shows and tours to support the album, and I certainly have been considering doing music videos sometime maybe later in the year or sometime next year. I have some ideas regarding that, but we’ll have to see what we’re actually able to put together based on budget constrictions and things like that.
One thing I noticed when looking at the lineup of the album is that you guys all had, for lack of a better way of putting it, foreign-sounding names – except for Dave’s first name, of course. How did you guys meet up?
Well, actually, Dave is from here and I’ve lived here for fifteen years now. We started out five years ago in 2008, and Dave and I and the two other founding members who are no longer in the band were all going to move in together. We all liked different kinds of metal, particularly European metal, but at the same time we had a pretty broad range within that realm since metal as a whole is a different universe of music with a limitless amount of subgenres. Ivan moved here maybe two years ago, I think, and we were looking for a guitarist at that time. He had put up an ad somewhere, either on a website or in a paper. I can’t remember if he got in touch with us or if we got in touch with him, but one way or another we got together, and that was really just a coincidence.
There are actually a lot of bands that are labeled as ‘international’, since with the Internet, they can just digitally send the portions of the album that they’re responsible for to the people who put it together and mix and master it.
I’m not surprised that that happens. I know that Woods of Ypres had two guys from Canada, and despite that, they recorded several albums and went on to tour all over the place several times. It’s a cool thing that bands can do that now.
When it comes time to make something new, what do you think Forlorn Path will do, as a band? Will they stick to their guns, or will they try something completely out of left field?
I would like to continue, ideally, to create something that’s really unique. I know that everything ends up innately sounding like something else, in some way or another, but I’d certainly like to continue exploring different areas of music and sound and create something that’s unique and not bound to any specific descriptions or genres, and I think that the rest of the band will keep on going in that direction, too. We definitely plan on making more music.
It was a pleasure talking to you, Yuriy, and I hope to hear from you guys next time you’re releasing a record. Did you have any final words for us?
Ah, I was never really good at final words, so we’ll just leave it at that. I’m glad you enjoyed the album. For those of you who haven’t listened to it, you can download it for free at our website. Keep on listening to music and keep supporting unsigned bands!
Buy the album and support the band at their official website.
