Phone interview with Patrick Loisel of Augury
By Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal
August 5th 2010, Los Angeles CA
Andrew: How's this tour going for you guys?
Patrick: Oh the tour is going really great. We are for the first time in the tour bus and we are with Death Angel and Swashbuckle who are like the coolest people you can have. Also, the turnout is great even though we are a bit heavy for the general crowd on this tour.
Andrew: Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you. You're the most technical, the most different band on this line-up. So what's the crowd reaction been like?
Patrick: Actually, a lot of them dig us anyways. We're not a totally death metal band from the beginning to the end of each song, you know. We have quiet parts and blast beats but we pretty much fit with the other bands as we also have nice solos and clean stuff. It's not like say Mortician was opening for Soilwork.
Andrew: How long do you get to play and what is the set of songs you're playing?
Patrick: We are playing about half an hour of this tour like everybody, because except for the headliner, all the other bands play more or less half an hour. But with the heat, for me it's a blessing because I'm 40 years old and sometimes it's like doing a big workout directly in front of a fireplace. We play half an hour and what we do is, we alternate between two sets and because on this tour we're not headlining where we would have gotten to play twice as long. So to keep things fresh, we play one half of the set on one night and the other half on the other.
Andrew: What's the situation with the band's line-up? Are your bassist and drummer permanent members or have you still not decided?
Patrick: Well that's funny because we never tour twice with the same line-up (laughs). The drummer is a permanent fixture. Tommy [McKinnon] is an old friend of ours. During the video recording of 'Concealed' [2004] we already knew Tommy. So he was always our first preference but the time wasn't right and he himself was not available when we needed a drummer. But now it's the right time. We might want to work with Forest [Lapointe, bass] again. Even if he doesn't want to tour, we would like to invite him on the album. We might ask the touring bassist on this tour but it'll be a little bit long because we've been touring and recording non-stop for three years and I have to put aside my career as a teacher. So when we go back to our professional careers and recover financially, we will write the third album. I already have a song for it. It's not quite ready to play live. I have a couple of other pieces too which I would arrange and prepare demos for the rest of the band. We want to do it faster than the previous records but not by too much. It's not the kind of music that you can go and record it in three days. We have to pick our time to do it.
Andrew: So you're going to start working on the album after this tour then?
Patrick: It'll be in the beginning of the winter because like I said, when we go back, we will be engulfed by our professional lives and also I will be hearing a lot of music every day for two months. I'll keep writing while the other guitar player [Mathieu Marcotte] will be recording a few bands over the fall and the winter so he will be a sound engineer. He's pretty good at that actually, and if it were just up to me, he would be producing the next Augury album.
Andrew: What kind of musical direction do you think you'd take with this next album?
Patrick: Pretty much the same, I think. We have no plan to break from our recipe so far. We might simply do the same thing, but we are not the type of band that tries to remain the same. What would be different for us is I might use more of the clean vocals because if I do an album that is mostly death metal vocals like Fragmentary Evidence, I would spend an hour doing the type of vocals that is most tiresome. So on this one I would keep it in such a way that when it comes to the live situation, I would be able to balance it much more easily, and not singing the same type of vocals for a long stretch.
Andrew: You said you are sharing the tour bus with Death Angel and Swashbuckle. What's it like hanging out with those guys?
Patrick: Fantastic! Swashbuckle are old friends and we've toured with them in the past, and 20 years ago I was a huge Death Angel fan, and still am. The band that I had 20 years ago, we did Death Angel covers. They are funny people, always smiling and laughing, specially Mark and Rob. They are really cool, straightforward and shy, all five of them. I wish to tour again with Death Angel. They have a new album coming out and I think it will be total thrash that's going to even outshine Act III. It's a rebirth for them.
Andrew: What tours will you be doing after this one?
Patrick: We have a co-headline tour with Aborted but that will be only in Canada. They're a good band and Sven is the guy who did our artwork so it'll be like a family tour. They also have Ken Sorceron from Abigail Williams. We toured with that band so Ken is a good friend so it'll be good to tour with him again.
Check out Augury's official myspace.
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