STRANGERS IN A STRANGELAND
The concept behind War Of Being explained in full. Well, sort of…
WHAT IS THE ‘WAR OF BEING’? The War Of Being is the overarching concept that runs through the new Tesseract album. As singer Dan Tompkins puts it, “It’s the story of two people who experience some form of trauma in life and it throws them into this landscape where they splinter into different parts of themselves.”
AND WHO ARE EX AND EL? They’re the protagonists of the War Of Being story. “They’re the vehicle through which we travel through this land, The Strangeland,” says bassist Amos Williams. “They are two people who arrived in this place on a journey together. Something happens in the song Natural Disaster, which is the moment where everything goes wrong.”
The 25 or so people gathered in the Cellar Bar in Bracknell, Berkshire on a cold October night in 2007 could be forgiven for not recognising the significance of what they were witnessing. Onstage, five men in their early 20s were blasting out a thrashy if geometrically complex noise that couldn’t quite conceal its debt to Meshuggah. The name on the flyers was ‘Tesseract’, a moniker that evoked hard-to-grasp concepts of four-dimensional mathematics, and this was their very first gig.
AND WHAT’S THE STRANGELAND? The Strangeland is the place in which War Of Being takes place. Amos: “On the surface, it’s a grey, rocky, harsh environment where it’s constantly raining – Iceland, basically. But everything Ex and El are experiencing is coalescing from a substance called The Dark Waters, which is raw chaotic thought. These things are constantly recycling and reforming the landscape.”
“We were a lot more raw and raucous back then,” says guitarist Acle Kahney, who had conceived Tesseract as a one-man project in the bedroom of his mum’s house in Milton Keynes four years earlier in 2003. “I was headbanging all over the place. Now I just think, ‘I can’t move like that any more ’cos I’ll probably make a mess of it all.’”
WHO ARE THE GREY AND KNOWLEDGE? They’re two of the characters who inhabit The Strangeland. The Grey, for instance, is a manifestation of Fate, represented in the game as a little child with basalt dogs that he creates out of a pool of raw thought.