Welcome to In Conversation, a special interview column on the site where we sit down with artists and dive deep into everything music. This week, Dobbin spoke with Tim Desbos of black metal/hardcore band Calligram a month after the release of Position | Momentum, discussed the history of the key tracks, and their live escapades. (Image credit: Andy Ford.)
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Dobbin: Tim, thank you very much for joining me and representing Calligram. How are you doing today?
Tim: Good, good, just spent the afternoon packing. We are rehearsing tonight and then we’re off to Italy on Wednesday for Frantic Fest. It’s the first time we do a gig where we’re just flying in. I’m literally going to have my guitar and my backpack, so I was just trying to work out, how many pedals can I fit? The battle between tone verses clothes and essentials, basically!
Dobbin: Looks like a great lineup: Gatecreeper, Rotting Christ, Conan, Artificial Brain, Misþyrming, Harakiri For The Sky…
Tim: Yeah! I’m excited for I Am Morbid. I was saying to our drummer that this could be our biggest gig so far. We did one festival (Immolation) at the end of May (2022) at the Electric Ballroom. It was really cool. We were on first, and we thought there was going to be no one there. We soundchecked and went backstage for 15 minutes. When we got back to the stage, there must have been about 600 people. I was like, wow, and it was at like 1:30, 1:45 in the afternoon.
Dobbin: You wrapped a short UK tour as well recently. How did that go for you?
Tim: It was brilliant. The days went really well. We played Sheffield, Bristol; Luton with Burner was really good. We’ve been listening to their records, they are lovely chaps, got on really well with them, loved their performance. I think our agent is think he’s thinking of putting together a little package for next year with us two and some other bands. That would be really exciting. Another time we played with Sun’s Journey Through The Night, they were absolutely absolutely amazing, and we get on really well. There’s lots of cool bands coming through the UK scene.
Dobbin: As a site we definitely feel really good about like the UK heavy scene right now. Another band you played with in Bristol was Copse.
Tim: Oh, yeah, they’re awesome. Lovely, lovely chaps as well. I think checked them out on the way to the venue, thought they were pretty decent. And since then, I’ve been going back to their previous releases. I think they just released three tracks on Church Road Records. Those guys are doing an amazing job, with all the bands they’re signing.
Dobbin: You’ve had the album out for exactly a month. How are you feeling about the reception?
Tim: Very happy with it. The feedback, the reviews we’ve had… We recorded it back in July 2022. We’ve been sitting on it for a year. And by the time it came out, we were basically sick of it. We didn’t know whether people were going to get into it or not. But we were really impressed by by the reviews, that’s been really nice. And that’s transposed into orders – I’ve been dealing with posting all the merch, and it’s probably the busiest we’ve been. We kind of needed that because not much has happened since the autumn. The Eye Is The First Circle came out right at the start the first lockdown.
Dobbin: Oh, man. Yeah. When I looked back at the release date my heart just broke. April 2020!
Tim: I think we had something like 19 dates that all got cancelled straight away. It was good to have that record coming out because it gave us content to talk about, but then we didn’t get to promote and tour it for one and a half years. We were already writing Position | Momentum whilst we were promoting The Eye Is The First Circle and it just felt a bit strange. Once we finished playing for The Eye… we had nothing new to give promoters or agents until Position | Momentum came out. So it’s good that things are picking up, and we want to be as busy as we can over the next few months, playing as much as possible.
Dobbin: I first heard “Ostranenie” on our Friday playlist. I immediately went to preorder the album. It was the same kind of epic black metal that I’ve loved for a very long time, really crisp, really fresh. Lots of ambient bits next to lots of really heavy stuff. Despite being seven minutes long, it’s one of the most streamed tracks from the record. For me, it’s the record’s centrepiece.
Tim: A lot of people have said that it’s the standout track. It’s weird, because there are two or three tracks on that record that we nearly dropped, and the writing process was long due to the lockdowns. “Ex Sistere” and “Frantumi In Itinere” were written back in 2020 or 2021. There were times when we asked, “do we still like this?” There was a moment when we actually we dropped “Ex Sistere” and weren’t sure if we’d record “Ostranenie“. And then a couple of people in the band and even outside the band that said we’d be so daft not to put them on.
Tim: On “Ostranenie” we were actually we were stuck where it gets the quiet, jazzy part. We didn’t know what should happen. And when you’re stuck on a song, you get bored of it. There was a time we thought, “maybe it’s not meant to be”. Then we had this idea, talking with our drummer, should we have another instrument? Straight away, I was thinking of an old student of mine who plays trumpet. I would be cool to have like a Miles Davis-ish moment. I went back to one of my favourite records by him, Lift To The Scaffold. Sometimes he’d have one or two chords ringing out with really dark trumpet melodies played over it. So I thought, maybe doesn’t have to be complicated – maybe if I can just hold two chords and then let the trumpet guy works some magic on it. One thing led to another, we re-jigged the parts before, and I came up with the part where the riff comes back and it explodes.
Tim: When I listen to “Ostranenie” and “Ex Sistere“, I can really feel that these tracks travelled through a lot of stages, and that’s why they work so well. Something I’ve learned from that writing process is that, no matter what ideal conception you have in your mind for your record, it gets to a point where you have to accept that the songs you’ve got are the record. You just have to refine them as much as you can, but you’re not going to have time to basically write another record. I must say that it was really nice when we demoed the tracks and sent them to Russ Russell who recorded and produced the whole record, and he was really into them. His enthusiasm really helped, because when you can tell that he’s into it, you realise “Oh, we must be doing something right”.
Dobbin: Was he the producer?
Tim: Yeah, he really got us, and we really got on well with him. Absolutely a blast recording with him. We never want things to be too triggered or too refined. We said to him that we’d like to sound the kind of where we sound live – in your face aggression, touch-and-go because sometimes you feel like we’re on the verge of breaking. We always flirt with our breaking points on stage. Russ really got that, and he managed to record us as close to our live sound as possible, he absolutely smashed it.
Dobbin: “Ex Sistere” was another one I wanted to shout out. It ended up being one of the ones you’ve had as a single and video, and if I was to hand somebody a track to sum up your band, I’d probably pick that one. It’s really clearly got those hardcore elements as well.
Tim: We thought it was too “nice”! That’s one of the tracks that they did in between lockdowns, I wasn’t really there, so I actually had to work my pants on top of what Bruno had written. And I came up with these stake punk-ish parts at the start. I thought, “I like this! But can we get away with doing that?” We were playing that song live before it came out. Our agent, Tyler (drummer of Tuskar) said “if you don’t put that song on the record, you idiots”. Fair enough – so we decided to keep it.
Tim: If you’re gonna get a bit softer, you really have to nail it. Otherwise, it can sound really wrong. So we’re very careful when we tread on melodic territory. It’s nice as well – I think what’s really exciting about black metal these days, since Deafheaven revolutionised black metal with with Sunbather, I think bands have been exploring all kinds of routes. I’m really into Liturgy at the moment, who are absolutely amazing. I’m gonna see them on the 24th of August, and I can’t wait, their drummer is insane as well. Boolin Tunes also reviewed a new band called Agriculture. I’ve been listening to it every day since since I read that review.
Dobbin: Agreed – I’ll be seeing Liturgy at ArcTanGent this week. You guys would be a great ATG band.
Tim: You’re lucky to be going to ATG because the line-up this year is, phew! Svalbard, Birds in Row – absolutely love Birds in Row, played with them a few times, one of my favourite bands – LLNN, Hidden Mothers from Sheffield, Conjurer… we’d love to play ATG.
Many thanks to Tim for joining me in a busy period for Calligram. Position | Momentum can be ordered through their bandcamp page here. Check out Dobbin‘s review of the record here.