Ad Nauseam

Sunday 05.09. 21:00 - Congress Dogana

Ad Nauseam

THE PAST

AD NAUSEAM started moving its first steps back in 2003, under the name Death Heaven. With that moniker, an official demo and an album had been released.

At that time, the genre was a kind of fast technical death metal played with a modern approach. Then, the sound started becoming more and more unorthodox, odd and obscure, revealing the most cryptic but yet evocative, violent, eerie side of the band's style. The new songs sounded so different than the previous material, that the band felt the need to close a chapter and leave the past behind. It was time to switch to AD NAUSEAM.

After at least 5 years dedicated to handle every minimal detail concerning songwriting, recordings and graphic layout, and thanks to the deep interest and support of the Czech label Lavadome Productions, in March 2015 the debut album "Nihil Quam Vacuitas Ordinatum Est" saw the light.

During the following months, the band had the pleasure to play at some European festivals and the album had been included in several 2015 AOTY lists.

THE DIY APPROACH

The name AD NAUSEAM is an explicit reference to the maniacal dedication the band puts to every aspect of the artistic creation process.

As a consequence, the band adopted the DIY approach in it's most authentic meaning for what concerns the sound.

To be able to keep under control every single step of the recording process and meet the band's target, not only all AD NAUSEAM records are self-produced, but also each band member contributes researching, designing and building most of the equipment used for the recordings (drums parts, cabinets, bass/guitar/studio related electronics) and collecting mainly vintage, odd and uncommon gears.

COMPOSITION

With their second album “Imperative Imperceptible Impulse”, AD NAUSEAM took a step forward in terms of composition, musical structures and sound.

The approach to and the philosophy behind the composition process is very similar to the classical music one: music is not intended as a mere sequence of riffs that sounds well one after the other (as part of NQVOE album and most metal album are conceived) but is now a naturally ordered structure where almost every musical event refers to the past and/or predict the future, generating very layered and complex patterns dominated by polyphony and polyrhytms and where each instrument has its own role and is essential in the whole.

The music represents a merging of many different styles, the most prominent ones being extreme death/black metal, avantgarde, jazz, post-core, doom/sludge and ambient. Nevertheless, the compositions of this album had been heavily influenced by the giants of 20th century classical composers, like Igor Stravinsky, Dmítrij Šostakóvič, Iannis Xenakis, Giacinto Scelsi, Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti, to name few.

Both the concepts of harmony and melody have been put into discussion to get a music where harmony is obtained by means of disharmony and melody by dissonances. To push this method even further, a unique tuning system has been conceived, to allow a new harmonic vocabulary and to eradicate the players from the comfort zone of the usual melodic patterns every guitar/bass player is used to.

THE SOUND

Concerning the recordings, AD NAUSEAM refuses the synthetic, flat, distorted, overload and fake sound of the modern production trends and goes to the opposite direction, again adopting the same principles that are used to record classical music. Summing up: less is more.

An extreme effort has been put to find a way to record the most natural, dynamic and three-dimensional sound possible. For this reason, instead of focusing on the mixing/post-production phase, an insane amount of attention has been paid studying how to capture the best sound since the very beginning. The maniacal assembly and calibration of the audio chain allowed to nearly eliminate the use of processors like equalizers and dynamic compressors. To use the words of one of the world best mixing engineers Steve Albini: "I want to hear the sound of the instrument, not the sound of the processor". That's also why the overall volume is not pushed to the insane levels of the modern productions, to give precedence to dynamics, punch and headroom.

Ad Nauseam

Line-Up