MESHUGGAH Guitarist: 'We Never Write Technical Music For The Sake Of Being Weird'

MESHUGGAH guitarist Mårten Hagström recently spoke to the Live 4 Metal webzine about the group's latest release, "Catch 33", and their unconventional songwriting approach. An excerpt from the interview follows:

Live 4 Metal: While MESHUGGAH has taken its cross-rhythmic style to incredible extremes, in many ways it has stuck to a certain system: odd groupings of beats against an underlying steady pulse. Has MESHUGGAH considered incorporating other techniques, such as mixing different beat divisions such as triplets or even quintuplets and septuplets into the scheme? Or would that not fit MESHUGGAH?

Mårten Hagström: "It's impossible to say what fits and doesn't fit. We would never ever consider thinking, 'OK, let's do quintuplets, or a really hard or technical or really advanced structure for a song just because it's so advanced.' We play pretty weird music; most people feel that we play pretty weird music. When you look at it from that perspective, it is pretty obvious straightaway that all of this, all of these ideas never, never, ever occur from actually calculating anything. I never sit down with a guitar and think, 'Hmm, if I went through this part, and then I did it really weird by doing it like this...' Thinking in technical terms is never an option, so whatever comes up in the head is what's going to come up in the head and that's the beauty of it. Which means that maybe there will one day come an idea like that that sounds super cool in someone's head and we'll record it. But we never do stuff that's more hard or more technical or more far out just for the sake of being weird."

Live 4 Metal: I guess it's just because the music is so foreign to most people and the rhythms are so crazy that people assume there must be a lot of calculation involved.

Mårten Hagström: "I understand why a lot of people might think that. People say, 'OK, it's got be a bitch to calculate all this shit and sit down and come up with all this weird stuff all the time. Don't you feel that you won't come up with any new radical ideas?' And then we're like, 'What radical ideas?' This is just how we want music to sound. We feel that this is something we need to do for our sakes, 'cause we think it's cool. So it's a natural process and a very subconscious thing."

Live 4 Metal: I've talked to people who say that the only way they could play a MESHUGGAH riff is to just memorize, even if it's just one group of beats, let's say there's a group of 7 beats, they have to memorize the way it lines up against the snare every time then think, "Oh, now I gotta change it to make it wrap around to 64 beats." For you guys does it come more naturally than that, where you don't even have to be counting all that crap out in your head, it's just coming out?

Mårten Hagström: "People can listen to our music for whatever reason they want. There's never any truth to music — the music is the interaction between the album and the listener and that's the end of it. But if somebody put a gun to my head and said, 'Now you fucking tell me what you guys are about, how do you want your music to be listened to?' It's basically about understanding that like you were saying, it's a 4/4 beat, y'know? When you start making it into a mathematical scheme that goes into counting '12345671234567...' you're going to be a slave to what the pattern tells you is going on to the music, not how the pattern moves over the music, you know what I'm saying? So to us it's just a cool AC/DC lick. We have musical ideas just the same way any other band has: you come up with something in our head and then you write it down. I don't really know how to explain it because it's just our way of doing it."

Read Mårten Hagström's entire interview with Live 4 Metal at this location.