Rockfreaks.net

RoO: G’day. Matt here, guitar, vox. We have Ian (aka Shrapnel) on leads, Alex on bass and Didier, our new drummer who has joined the band since the album was recorded. Unfortunately Pete was getting homesick and has returned to Australia to be with his family. So we are finding our feet again, working hard on getting the live set in shape.

RoO: There have been a few disruptions. I moved to Europe soon after the first demo was recorded and spent a few years drifting from country to country so it took a while for things to settle down and a solid line up to crystallise. But we were never in any hurry. I think perhaps more bands could benefit from taking their time and allowing their music to mature instead of rushing out a pile of albums.

RoO: We are satisfied with the result. There is no doubt that Necro did a great job with the sound. There a few small things that could have perhaps been done better but nothing major.

RoO: Razor was started long before I joined Destroyer, which was about the time that Ian joined Razor. So my main focus has always been Razor. I like to think they are complementary, Destroyer provides more of the easily accessible catchy stuff and Razor more of the extreme thrash attack. Lyrically the approach is quite different as well.

RoO: The similarities between the bands are superficial. D666 uses a lot of slower melancholic passages whereas Razor is a constant high-energy thrash barrage. I can tell you it is much more technically demanding. These differences will be readily apparent when the respective new albums are compared. I think they are in fact quite complementary.

RoO: We have a lot of Destroyer shows on at the minute. Hopefully we will tour later in the year with Razor of Occam. Destroyer and Razor shows would be problematic, it would be hard to give it everything twice in the same night but I won’t rule out the possibility entirely.

RoO: We were very surprised. We tried to secure some funding before we went to the studio on the back of a home recorded demo, but that didn’t work so we had to pay the studio costs ourselves. With the finished product in hand we tried again, using a bloke with some industry connections to act as go between. The superior production seemed to do the trick and here we are.

RoO: I guess a big influence during the band’s formation was Carl Sagan, in particular his book "The Demon Haunted World". Since then a new brigade of intellectuals have stepped into the breach, foremost in the public eye being Dawkins and co. The attack on the World Trade Centre highlighted the problem, as did the presidency of the tyrant Bush. On this side of the pond we suffered similar attacks in 2005 and similarly incompetent leadership under Blair. It is hard to escape the impression that reason is under attack- under the guise of creationism in the US and state funded religious indoctrination in so called faith schools here. Promising research is constantly stymied on the basis of irrational religious beliefs. The scientific method has made incredible advances in the last hundred years, yet it seems to have had little impact on the general public. Just about every newspaper in the world still runs a daily horoscope page, yet an article on astronomy remains a rare treat. It seems to me perilous in the extreme for medieval superstition to coexist with the power of modern technology. Just imagine the consequences of Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Muslim extremists.

RoO: It is fanciful to think there is a simple solution to the world’s complex problems. But there are no problems that cannot be solved by the application of clear reasoned thinking.

RoO: We are working on some new ideas. It is early days yet but it is sounding promising so far. Expect music in the same vein but a slightly different direction.

RoO: Cheers for the interview.