ISIS

I spoke to Aaron Turner of ISIS for the March 2007 issue of Mean Street Magazine.

Brutal Truth

Listening to a band like Isis, it takes more than simply listening to the music to gain a complete understanding of what they are about. Opening up for Tool doesn’t hurt either.

“The tour went better than I expected,” explains vocalist/guitarist Aaron Turner, referring to Isis’ support slot on Tool’s U.S. tour last year. “Once we started playing, I realized that the Tool fans are a lot brighter than I thought. It was probably not what they expected but we got to do our thing on stage every night.”

The band’s latest release, In the Absence of Truth, is on its way to becoming their biggest release to date.

Since 1997, Turner began Isis as an outlet to create art with friends that were unsatisfied with the projects each member was involved with at that time. Turner himself was an art student and needed an outlet for his creative side. He still does much of the graphic design work for the bands on his L.A.-based label, Hydra Head Records.

Prior to In the Absence of Truth, Isis issued a DVD called Clearing the Eye, which captured live clips from tours across the globe over the past five years.

“It is different playing the Troubadour in L.A. and, say, playing somewhere like New York or Boston, or even Australia,” Turner says. “There will be different people that act differently and their reactions will do that.”

“The Tokyo show was amazing since everyone there was silent through most of the set and we weren’t sure what to think,” he continues. “They were so quiet and polite, but they were just watching and seeing what we were doing on stage. It was a great show.”

And while the Isis fan base largely rests on its cult status, the band has been exposing itself to wider audiences.

For one, the tour with Tool (whose bassist Justin Chancellor is a fan of the band and contributed to the song “Altered Course” from Isis’ previous release, Panopticon) granted the band a lot of exposure. In ‘04, Isis was invited to perform a free show at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A. as part of an art exhibit.

“It was the final week of the exhibit and we played in the middle of this art exhibit room,” says Turner. “Most of the people there probably were there for the art exhibit and had no idea who we were. We played the Oceanic album since we were promoting that release at the time. I think the people there liked it. I’m sure it was weird for them to see a band play in there that they didn’t know.”

The latest album was inspired by everything from mystic Islamic leader Hassan-I-Sabbah to stories such as Don Quixote, resulting in a melting pot of ideas.

“I think the big thing on this one is that we had more time to work on the record,” Turner says. “On the past releases, everyone was on different schedules and we couldn’t do all of the things we wanted to do. We wanted to work on song structures more and especially the vocals since it was something that wasn’t a real focus before.”

But despite this, Turner acknowledges that Isis will likely never become a mainstream band.

“One thing is that none of our songs are under seven minutes long, which does not work well for radio,” he says. “We can’t cut our songs down and we won’t. Plus within the songs, there is only about a minute’s worth of vocals in any of our songs. So vocals have never been a focal point.”

On the web: isistheband.com