CHASE MASON of GATECREEPER Talks About Upcoming Australian Tour & New Album
Marco had a chat with Chase Mason of GATECREEPER, discussing their upcoming Australian tour, recording their new album, the visual aspect of music, live shows and Wolverine Blues.
DS: Hey, Chase. Cheers for meeting with me. How are you today?
C: Pretty good. How are you?
DS: I’m good. Thank you. April will see Gatecreeper back in Australia for a more comprehensive tour after last year's Into the Fall Festival and the two sideshows. Are you excited to be coming back, especially for a much larger run?
C: Yes, absolutely. What city are you in?
DS: I'm in Perth, so I didn't get to see you last time, so I'm super stoked.
C: Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people are saying we needed to go there. We only had three shows last time, so I'm excited to go to Perth, yeah.
DS: Hell yeah. It's going to be an exciting tour. The two different posters you made for this tour look so sick. I'm a big fan of your design work, along with Gatecreeper's consistent branding. How important is branding to you from a musician's perspective?
C: Thank you. I mean, as far as all the visuals, it's very important to me. I think that using the word like branding or something for your band feels kind of weird. I mean, there is the whole element of business and the music business, your band's your own business. So I guess it's not wrong, you know, the branding of it. But that is something that's very important to me and I think important to all of us, is the visual aspect. And it's, you know, it helps that it's something that I'm interested in. You know, like I love to collect band shirts, so I always want to have cool merch. You know, shirt designs that I would wear, you know, a lot of the things are based on my own personal preferences. And then with flyers and stuff, you know, I do think that we have established a very specific look for what Gatecreeper looks like. You know, you see a tour flyer, you know, it looks like a Gatecreeper tour flyer. You see an album cover, it looks like a Gatecreeper album cover, you know. So I'm constantly trying to incorporate new things into it while still kind of staying on the same path, and, you know, we've even started to establish more, in other realms, say, like photos or videos or whatever, like starting to develop our own signature, like what photos look like, you know. I've been very into film photography and so, like, you know, a lot of photos that we do or film photos for video, I've been really into these. I got like an old VHS camera. You can actually watch one of the first ones that I made, which was when we went to Australia last year, you can look up on YouTube, you know, search ‘Gatecreeper Australia’ and I made like a home video, I guess, using this camera.
DS: I did see that, that was so good.
C: Thank you, thank you. So yeah, it encompasses everything. You know, first and foremost, we're a band. We're a metal band. We want to have good songs. We want to, you know, make good records. We want to be a good live band. But everything beyond that is very visual, you know, and I think that that's part of this whole thing that we do, that I think that sometimes gets lost in the mix, you know, like a really good band that has a really good record and their album cover just sucks, you know, and it's like I don't even want to listen to it, you know, and that's suck because I'm missing out, but that's just, we're a very visual society. You know, whether you're flipping through records at the record store or whatever it is, like scrolling on your phone, you know, like the flyer better be cool or else nobody's going to stop for one second and look at it. You know, so it's all very important to me. And just practically is, you know, like we need to have things that look good so that people look at, they'll take the time to look at it. But also artistically for me, I'm interested in the visual arts as well as music, so it all ties in and it's yeah, it's a passion of mine. And the band is a passion of mine as well, so they just they go hand in hand and I have a good time doing it.
DS: Last year, Gatecreeper was at God City Studio recording album three. Can we expect an announcement pretty soon?
C: Yeah! Yeah, so all this, you know, the Asia and Australian tour is the first of many and it's, you know, it's not really a secret, but all this is happening because we have a new record coming out. By the time we get to Australia, there will be new music out for sure. The record is not going to be out yet until probably around the summer. But by the time we're there, there's going to be new music for sure.
DS: Awesome. Looking forward to it. What's it like working with Kurt and what keeps you going back to God City?
C: Kurt's awesome. I think that he's one of the modern legends, you know, even before we started this band, even before I even had a band to do it, you know, like I always wanted to record with Kurt. You know, I've been a fan of his records for a long time, his recordings. Around the same time that the band formed I was able to meet Kurt, like not even in the in the working sense, just in a personal sense through some mutual friends. So by the time Gatecreeper got to a point and it was our first full length, you know, we asked him to mix it and we worked like that with him for the next couple of records where we recorded it. You know, we tracked the record or the recording with our friend in Arizona and then we would send it to Kurt to mix. And this new record is the first time that we actually went and recorded with him at his studio in Salem. So that was a new experience. But we always come back to him because he, I think, understands our band and specifically for the guitar tone that we use, you know, the HM-2 Swedish death metal guitar tone. I don't think that there's anybody better than him to capture that tone and to know what to do because it's a pretty- I don't know if you play music or you're familiar with this specific guitar tone- but it's very wild, you know, like it's very hard to like reel in, you know, it could sound really cool but when you try to record it, it sounds like garbage, you know. So it's not an easy task to be able to wrangle in and capture that guitar tone. And I think that Kurt does it the best out of anybody in the world. At the current time, you know.
DS: I watched your set at Bloodstock last year on YouTube, which was not only a sick set, but I caught the new track ‘Caught in the Treads’, which sounded so damn good. What can we expect, musically, from album three?
C: Yeah, that song we decided to start playing when we were in Europe, playing some festivals last summer. And that's one from the new record that was pretty much designed for that, you know, playing outdoor European music festivals, you know. Like I think what people should expect from our record is, it's our record where we've been a band long enough and we've been touring long enough, and we've had enough experiences to write a record that was specifically for playing live or playing bigger stages or whatever it is. Because we over the time over time when we're writing new songs and we make a record. We aren't really taking into account like, what is this going to look like on stage? Like, how is this song going to fit into our set or whatever it is? So over time, we learned like, oh, these type of songs work better in the live setting or specifically, you know, on a big stage, at a festival or whatever. So we've learned and we were able to use that information and make and write new songs with specifics of, like, we know that this is what we need to do to translate onto and into a live setting or for this record, it's like, what do we do to make our songs more memorable? What do we do so that people can like sing along to our songs in some way? You know, like how can we make the songs catchier? So that that was kind of our goal going into this record. But I just think that we've just gotten better and we know what we're doing. And there's going to be some surprises in there for some people. But we're just trying to do our own thing and just write good songs.
DS: Awesome. Well, I'm definitely looking forward to the record. So can't wait for that to be out.
C: Thank you. Thank you.
DS: I've watched a lot of live sets over the years, like from Hate5Six videos and whatnot, and I love the little sound bites and funny samples you have between songs.
C: (laughs)
DS: Was that something that just happened organically one day?
C: (laughs) Yeah, I don't know, I mean, we're definitely not the first band. I've definitely watched bands do stuff like that and that's probably where I got the idea over the years of watching bands and seeing what they do on stage and yeah, breaking it up a little bit, I guess. You know, I have a pedal that I control that's mainly for the samples, like in between songs. So say, you know, we do we do like two or three songs in a row, then we have a break for everybody to tune and there's some sort of like ambient noise playing so it's just not completely silent. So usually we'll we'll make new one new samples every couple of years to fit with whatever our current setlist is and so there's been many different batches of samples that we've used. But whenever I'm uploading these samples to the pedal, I'll usually find a couple that I think are funny and that I can throw in there once, like there was one where I had like a bunch of different James Hetfield’s saying “Yeah.” So there's like a bunch of those. I used to do like a “walk of flock of flame” one. I used to do that like that Datpiff DJ call out that's like, “damn, son, where’d you find this?” I really like that one. I've taken a couple of different samples from different things. And it's always funny just to break it up because I'm not really a person that on stage I really like to say much. I keep it pretty minimal so to have something like that, that I can kind of take the attention away, that I'm not expected to say something, it comes in handy to have something maybe a little bit funny or like say if something goes wrong, like someone breaks a string or like there's some sort of equipment malfunction that I can hit something to kind of distract from us scrambling on stage then. So maybe I'll have to maybe I'll have to put some new ones on there for Australia.
DS: Are there any bands you still have on your bucket list to tour with?
C: Yeah, let's see. We've crossed a lot of them off, you know, like we've been very fortunate, you know, one of our first big like the first big one for us was Cannibal Corpse, got to tour with them. We got to tour with Obituary. We got to tour with Hatebreed. We got to tour with Dying Fetus. So we've we've been knocking them off the list. In Flames was on one and we just, you know, it ended up happening. Not necessarily that we made that happen, but you know, we put it out there, you know, like I'm a big fan of In Flames. We got to meet them last year and it was like, all right, let's, you know, I'm going to put this out into the universe and then it ended up happening. I think that one that's maybe a little bit surprising for some people, but for us, I would really like to tour with Amon Amarth. We got to we got to play a show with them last year, just a one off show. They were touring with Ghost and they had some off day shows. So there was just one show in California that we went out and played with Amon Amarth and they're really cool. The people from the band that we've met were really nice and we have a mutual respect for Amon Amarth and that there are a death metal band, unmistakably a death metal band. You know, they don't have like melodic sung choruses or anything like that. There’s a specific theme to it, which might for some people be something that they're not into. But for the most part, they're a death metal band and they're a huge band. You know, like they didn't have to take the cheap, that sometimes it can be viewed as a cheap shortcut to be like, “Hey, we want to be more accessible. We're going to start singing” or something like that. For Amon Amarth, they have catchy songs and they're just they're doing their own thing. And they're, I would say that they're in the top five, like most popular death metal bands at the time or of all time. So I think that would be cool for us to get in front of people who are just huge Amon Amarth fans and get to play in front of those people and maybe turn them, you know, a small percentage of them, if any, to turn those Amon Amarth fans into Gatecreeper fans.
DS: If you could travel back to any year in music, which year or era would you go back to?
C: Let's see. I was born in 1987 and I think that from about ‘87 to ‘92, there was a lot of good music that I liked that was released. Death metal was just kind of becoming a genre. Then the early formations by ‘92, I think it kind of reached its height and then at that point, a lot of bands started doing something different, which is cool. You know, we saw a lot of death metal bands, especially European or Scandinavian death metal bands that, a couple of albums in, they, you know, they did their Wolverine Blues or whatever it is to try to branch out, whether it's because they got bored with death metal or they just kind of thought, hey, there's nothing more I can do with this without changing it up a little bit. And I relate to that a lot. And that's kind of our vision going into our new record was like, hey, let's, you know, we're going to always be a death metal band, but let's try something a little bit different, maybe something different from our peers or something that’s different than we usually do. So I think early nineties would be a cool, to answer your question, would be cool to be around for the original wave of everything that was going on, but also being there when things started to change up and get a little bit weirder.
DS: Finally, is there anything you'd like to say to your Australian fans before your upcoming tour?
C: Just that we're excited to come over, you know, we dipped our toes in last time, just a couple shows and it went over really well and we were motivated to come back. I think that Australia is a place that I can see us coming back to pretty regularly. So we're excited to come back and also to, you know, really sink, you know, sink in and acclimate and, you know, start putting in the work to have a presence in Australia and in all other places in the world. So I'm glad that we're able to play some of the smaller places, like you said, for say, or not even smaller, I know, Perth is a pretty big city, but some of the, I guess, play some other places than that we did before, which was Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. So we're playing those places again, which will be great, but playing the other kind of cities in between will be cool because it'll be, you know, like, like you said, there's some people that maybe would have liked to have seen us last year, but we weren't playing in their city or close to it. And I think a lot more people have an opportunity to come out this time around.
Listen to ‘Starved’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1sVCqlooGY
DESTROY ALL LINES PRESENTS:
GATECREEPER (USA)
With special guests
KRUELY (JPN) and WORLD OF JOY
GATECREEPER Australian Tour Dates:
Thursday April 4 - Vinnie’s Dive Bar, Gold Coast
Friday April 5 - The Brightside, Brisbane
Saturday April 6 - Newcastle Hotel, Newcastle
Sunday April 7 - Crowbar, Sydney
Tuesday April 9 - Dicey Riley’s, Wollongong
Wednesday April 10 - The Basement, Canberra
Thursday April 11 - Prince Bandroom, Melbourne
Friday April 12 - Singing Bird Studios, Frankston AA
Saturday April 13 - Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide
Sunday April 14 - Lynott’s Lounge, Perth
Tickets: https://daltours.cc/gatecreeper
General Public on sale: 10am Friday January 26th
