Highly skilled and focused, James Isaac, more commonly known as Jimbob, has worked for many years in the world of art and music. With a background in bands like HARK and TAINT, while also creating pieces for bands like MASTODON, he’s no stranger to the extreme side of music and all the colour and textures you can produce within it. We caught up about his lockdown project SILVERBURN and how it’s evolved into a full fledged live band.
Having written all the music and preformed it himself for the album, the fact that SILVERBURN has now blossomed into several members was something of a shock to Jimbob. “I probably wrote at least one or two of the songs, if not more, before I even thought it would a get recorded [or] get performed by me or a live band,” he recalls. “It was totally just for myself, zero fucks. I didn’t even think that anyone would end up physically playing it as a band. At that point, I had no idea I would end up recording it as a proper album with myself playing the drums!”
The idea to produce something for the discipline of it is quite something, then to be stuck with a pandemic that gives you the time to dedicate to a huge project, it almost seems inevitable that SILVERBURN would be something more than just a small set of ideas. “[Initially I figured] I’m just gonna make this as like a home-made digital album, you know, put it out on Bandcamp and don’t make too much of a fuss about it,” Jimbob explains about the evolution of the project in the early days. “Early on, I thought, ‘okay, I’m gonna write eight songs. This is my challenge. And I’m going to do it within twelve months’. And I did it; I demoed all of the songs with all of the drums and everything digitally, all within twelve months. And then it was the following twelve months where I trained myself on the physical drumming, to be able to then record it after a total of two years at that point. The self-challenging was a huge motivation behind it.”
The songs on Self Induced Transcendental Annihilation, are bombastic and both broad sweeps brutal, while also inflecting many subtleties within that tumult. “A song tells you what it needs; it decides,” Jimbob muses when queried on when to know when to let the song be ‘finished’. “So you don’t really decide about what stays and what goes. [It removes] a selfish perspective of keeping things just because like, I wrote that part. That’s not really how it works, at least not for me anyway. Whether it’s one person channelling it or a group of people channelling it, that’s how I see it working. So yeah, just let the song write itself and you’ll know when it’s done.”
With the band initially being just Jimbob being in control, and with no outside pressures from anyone to even write this music, for many, that open-ended can be a hindrance. Jimbob, however has been very disciplined. “I’ve always liked self-imposed deadlines anyway, because they dictate your timetable. You just sort of work backwards from it.” Jimbob explains. “I find it easier to write on my own. And fundamentally I see it all songwriting as coming from a whole perspective anyway, like a holistic perspective.”
“So even in my previous bands, the majority of the material I wrote. And all of my riffs come from a rhythmical standpoint anyway, so it’s almost like so I would always be suggesting to previous drummers that I’ve worked with, I would always be suggesting beats and grooves and tempos to them. So it was just a case for me to up my drumming game, which is, again, another motivational part of this is to want to be able to do that. I kind of feel like it’s almost in a way easier for me to just do it on my own even if certain aspects of it can become more time consuming.”
On the other hand, while there are parts that are more time consuming, SILVERBURN has been such a successful endeavour because Jimbob has been keen to improve his own musicianship through the process. Take his drumming for example; he learnt more efficiently how to play and actually record his own drums so as to authentically create naturalistic rhythms. “Well I just feel like I can be more intuitively creative, instead of like relying on a drummer to interpret something in a certain way when I know how I want it to be interpreted. So, I can do that now, instead of like, battling with a drummer, maybe who might not be able to sort of feel what I’m feeling or whatever.”
The sludgy, doomy groove of SILVERBURN essentially rest on those drum ideas being fully realised, in order for the huge riffs to really hit hard. That effectively comes from Jimbob himself and his history with music. “Many of those bands [who influenced me] have all got such great dynamics, tempo changes and tempo shifts, and yeah, it’s, I felt like it’s always been an intuitive part of my arsenal actually over the years. So yeah, I just love it, but I find it intuitive. It’s just when you change gears, and so some bombastic riff change.”
While SILVERBURN started as a one man project, in it’s final iteration the members have had to all learn how to slip into their places as naturally as possible. “Oh, the guys have been really sympathetic to what was needed, what the songs need,” Jimbob nods. “And that ultimately is for it to be played as close as possible. I mean, you know, there can be subtleties in maybe the articulation of one or two drum parts here or there, to a very modest degree. But other than that, it’s pretty much just learning how to play it, as it is.”
“And my drummer Adam – it’s been amazing to see him being able to internalise the different rhythms and tempos and feels for each part in each song, and Ross as well on bass. Because yeah, I’ve got I suppose I’ve got quite a such an organic feel? Yeah, there’ll be like, two tempos within one riff kind of thing, because it’s all down to swing, basically. They’ve both been really committed to learning it and feeling it and they’ve done a super great job.”
Self Induced Transcendental Annihilation is out now via MSH Music Group.
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