Dead Meadow.

TAKE ONE PART My Bloody Valentine, one part Black Sabbath, throw in a lot of references to turn of the century mysticism, and you get Dead Meadow. The following words are excerpts from a conversation with lead singer and guitarist Jason Simon, guitarist Cory Shane, and bassist Steve Kille.

Where did you go to school?

Jason: George Washington University. But playing rock put an end to that. A lot of authors that Cory and I have been digging on for years. Extending outwards on that HP Lovecraft school, Clark Ashton Smith, even earlier than that. Authors involved with the Golden Dawn movement. There's so much far-out shit from the turn of the century. With songs, the utmost importance is to capture a mood in an indefinite way so that it's not giving you every image. The problem with what comes out today is--it's such an onslaught of bullshit images, songs with too many parts, movies with too many scenes. There's no time for your mind to wander. We wanted to create something kind of translucent. You can get into it on a fiat level, but it also allows you to open up into--whatever words you want to use to describe it--infinity. Allow people time to use their imagination.

Jason: Which is a giant thing these days. Everything hapens so fast, there's no time to use your imagination. We want to make slow, long songs so that people will try to use their imagination. I like authors like Edgar Allen Poe. It wasn't so much the narrative that was important but that every word, every sentence was geared towards creating a certain mood and holding that mood so you could really get inside it. Which brings me around to Ragas. Ragas are created from a certain scale that has so many more microtones than our (Western) scales. They hone in to a perfect moment, like sunrise on a certain day, which reflect upon you. In holding that scale and mood for so long, which might be a passing mood, it becomes really psychedelic. You can get your mind going on it.

Do you feel influenced by Eastern thought?

Jason: Definitely Eastern music. I love the drone, modal character of it. Creating a mood and trying to keep it there. It's interesting to try to create a mood and have the mood build throughout the song. People have short attention spans these days. You want to make things interesting enough to hold them, but the whole point is to stretch their attention spans. People appreciate it, but I don't know if the general populous has that kind of an attention span.

Dead Meadow is challenging the attention span of the populous.

Cory: It's all in the listener's hands, really. That's the thing about music--it's subjective when creating it and subjective when listening to it. People are so inundated with images--with the Internet and so much information. If somebody wants to get an idea about something, they can instantly have access to information about it.

Cory: Yeah, they can just read a blurb about something rather than reading a book about it.

All of this information stifles creativity; rather than using your imagination to fill in some blank about what something is, people can refer to the blurb on the web.

Jason: I'm guilty of it too. Why do something the hard way? Why walk a mile when I could drive there? But how much more enjoyable would it really be just to take the trip?

How much more would you experience?

Jason: Nell Young was writing songs like "Sugar Mountain" when he was 19. People don't grown up as fast anymore, because they're hit with so many images that they become numb. Like when they play video games. I'm guilty of it, too. I played video games for my whole fucking youth. Years! And now I feel like playing video games was time spent not living.

So many distractions.

Jason: It's all distraction. But it's hard because some people want that from music, too. And I guess Dead Meadow is a distraction. I mean, I definitely am in to all things escapist. My lyrics are some of the most escapist lyrics out there. But in doing that, it really opens up your imagination and your mind. It's all about creating a world unto itself. You can start with Tolkein creating Middle Earth--he was a profoundly religious person. When you get down to it the purpose of life is to know yourself, because the purpose of all of creation is to know itself. So it's like I'm trying to create a world, a spark within myself that is equivalent to that spark of the universe. We've gotten to a weird place in the West where people are starving for something spiritual. I'm sure you see it around here with all of the yoga places popping up everywhere. It's a shame that as soon as it gets big in America it becomes bullshit.