James Carstairs

May 24, 201917 min read

Ihlo 'Union' Interview

Updated: Dec 26, 2019

An interview with Andy, Clark and Phil (Ihlo) regarding ‘Union’ which will be released on May 31st 2019

I had the pleasure of having (more than) a few questions answered by the wonderful Ihlo. Their debut album ‘Union’ is highly anticipated among fans, and the two singles leading up to the release have been met with high praise. Ihlo are: Andy Robison (keys, vocals, and sound design), Phil Monro (guitars and production), and Clark McMenemy (drums). Michael Roberts will be the live bassist, and Rob Mair will be the live Guitarist for Ihlo. The album was mastered by Lucas de la Rosa (of Archætype and Delsey Hill). This interview is longer than normal, usually I would have edited it down, but all of this stuff is relevant, and gives a great insight into the creative masterminds behind ‘Union’.

How long have you each been playing music?

[Andy] When I was maybe 10 years old or so, my mum got me involved with a street drumming band where everyone had a different drum piece and played a bunch of songs together in a big circle. I played the snare drum. Most of the performances the group did were fairly political so it’s kind of weird looking back at being involved with that when I didn’t really know what was going on but the drumming was fun. Fast forward to being around 14 or so and I started my first proper band where I played drums. We were together for at least 4 or 5 years and I learned a lot from that experience. Towards the end of the band’s life I began to dabble a lot more in making tracks in FL Studio and trying to learn other actual instruments, though working with midi ended up being more inspiring to me. To sum up, playing music has been fairly constant throughout my life in one way or another.

[Clark] In terms of playing together it's been three years for Andy and Phil, two since I joined up. I've been playing drums for thirteen years now - when I was seven or eight my folks got me a toy drum kit, and I loved that thing. I begged them for a full kit when I was ten, and I was lucky enough to unwrap it on Christmas morning. Mad respect to my parents for not only putting up with it, but for encouraging me too.

[Phil] I started on piano at 7 with traditional classical lessons, and starting playing around with guitar and drums in my early teens. From 13 to 16, drums was actually my main instrument, playing in various rock/metal bands, and then from 16 to 18 I focused entirely on virtual instruments and experimenting with electronic music, becoming really interested in midi and music production at the same time. When i was 19 or 20 I rediscovered guitar and started learning how to produce rock music at the same time.

How did the band form?

[Andy] I used to run various different meme pages online because there’s not really much else to do when you’ve left school and can’t get a job. Phil sent me his original version of Parhelion in April 2016 and I thought it was really interesting, the production in particular I found to be really outstanding for a bedroom guitarist. I asked him if he wanted to try collaborating and we originally intended to work on an electronic project. There were some good ideas in that but we lost communication for a month or two.

He caught up with me by sending me his newly finished ‘Iris’ instrumental EP. I really enjoyed it and asked if he wanted vocals for it and we continued working from there with a much stronger focus than the electronic project. Clark was introduced to the band after nearly a year of working on ‘Union’. The majority of the songs were written in some form and I had seen him posting drum clips online and thought that he’d be a good fit for the band if we were to ever play live. Originally brought on board as a drummer for playing live shows, he ended up reprogramming all the drums across the album!

[Clark] Andy and Phil can tell you how they got started - as for me, Andy and I grew up in the same city and I was introduced to him at a Devin Townsend gig. I followed some of the meme pages he admined on Facebook for a few years after that (RIP Meme Theater), generally just lurking and admiring his music. I had no idea he was really aware of me apart from a few nice comments on drum videos.

He posted a video of the keyboard solo of Reanimate on a page we were both part of, I told him how awesome it was, and he asked me to join in the next comment. At first I didn't think it would be possible since I had moved to Edinburgh, and 100 miles of distance isn't particularly conducive to a band's success. Once Andy explained it was all being written over the internet I gave it some serious thought, but it was easy to make my mind up in the end - the material they had was amazing, I'd always highly respected Andy, it had a ton of potential.

I came up with some rough ideas for Reanimate and Starseeker, the most finished songs at the time, and they liked the direction I took with Phil's original drums. I don't think there was a big official 'you are now band member’ speech; I just went to work on rewriting the drum midi from the ground up.

[Phil] I had become aware of Andy’s existence because of some Dream Theater/general prog related Facebook groups that he was attached to, and after sharing some of our early musical efforts we decided to start an ambient/experimental/drone type electronic based project. We had some ideas and demoed a couple of them but ultimately it ended up fizzling out.

A couple months after that I released my first metal based EP, Iris. The production was bad (I still hadn’t figured out how to produce rock/metal music yet) but the ideas were there, and Andy must have heard potential in it, as well as potential for vocals. He came to me and asked if we should change direction creatively and try some more progressive metal focused ideas.

We created the core of every single song on the album (as well as several others that were either cut or kept for future songs) in what was probably my most productive musical time of my life, and Andy enlisted Clark, who he only knew tangentially at that time, who joined on to write far more interesting drum parts.

How did you come up with the band name - and were there any other names that almost made it?

[Andy] A couple of days of brainstorming and endless googling, flicking through random letter generators and thesauruses etc. Given how many bands exist in the world, it’s basically impossible to find anything truly original that doesn’t feel convoluted. I actually tried to find some of the old messages between myself and Phil where we spoke about name suggestions but there was never anything that was that great! When I pitched Ihlo, it was pretty much immediately agreed on by the two of us and here we are now.

[Phil] Andy just threw random made up words at me and Ihlo is the only one that didn’t totally suck, which is a feat in itself with such namespace pollution when it comes to music artists nowadays.

I have to ask...eye-low or eee-low?

[Andy] I love hearing people pronouncing it their own way so I don’t want to say!

[Clark] Yes.

[Phil] Ihlo.

Is there a particular direction you want to take Ihlo as a band? Any new styles or sounds?

[Andy] I’m mostly interested in continuing to use more electronic sounds as we go on. Towards the ending of making ‘Union’ there were a lot of unexpected electronic elements that crept in that I’d like to expand on. Mostly just making more use of ambient sounds and textures.

[Clark] We've all developed as musicians since Union was written, it's inevitable when you spend this long working on the same music. My drum style is a lot more ‘natural’ than it was - I'm trying to really feel the music, the grooves, all the individual elements of what makes a beat. If you can deconstruct it all in your head, you can build it back up in new and interesting ways.

You can actually hear the difference in the album timeline - Hollow, one of the last songs written, has more of this style of playing compared to Reanimate, which is more rigid and methodical. That's the direction I wanna go in with my drums.

[Phil] I know Andy has been listening to the Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack recently, and drawing a lot of inspiration from that, and I know Clark wants more blast beats. So... Blast beat Blade Runner.

On a personal note, I would love to put even more electronic elements into our music. It’s what sets Ihlo apart from being just a metal band, so i’m going to try and get involved with tinkering with analogue synths and effects. It was never the intention to use so many electronic elements in our music, but both Andy and I are inclined to create music that way so it just happened naturally, and I think we’re going to expand on that.

Are there new developments after ‘Union’ on the horizon, or can we expect to wait a while?

[Andy] The plan is to limit ourselves to an EP that can be a quicker follow up than another full album would end up being. After ‘Union’ is out and we’re truly out in the public eye, it doesn’t feel reasonable for a band of our level to be taking another 3 years to make an album.

[Clark] We have a lot of material we're eager to work on, I'd imagine it won't be too long before we're at it again.

[Phil] There’ll be a brief reprieve for us to catch our breath after the mad rush towards the end of album production, and to allow my creativity time to rejuvenate, but we’ve got some ideas already stored away and a reasonable plan about what we want our next project to be. Whether it be an EP or another full length, all we know is we don’t want to keep people waiting another 3 years for new music. We’re eager to get started on something new.

Is the ultimate goal to make Ihlo full time?

[Andy] I’m not sure how that would ever be a viable option financially, but I’m sure it would be nice. At the same time, I’m not sure how much we’d benefit from having that kind of unlimited focus on one project. For me personally, being able to take the opportunity to distance myself from the album for brief periods have helped to put things in perspective and greatly influence parts of the music. If it was full time, I’m not sure if it would have that same benefit.

[Clark] I think all of us would love for that to happen, but being a full-time musician requires a lot of work if you want to keep the lights on; we all have marketable skills that can make us money in the industry, but only time will tell how successful that will be.

[Phil] For me, the ultimate goal is to make either writing music or music production full time (preferably both to keep things fresh and interesting). It’s hard to imagine being able to sustain ourselves just with Ihlo, only with ridiculous album sale success and relentless touring, but part of what keeps me able to enjoy writing music is to have time away from it.Saying that, it would sure be nice. Buy our album.

From start to finish, how long did it take you to record ‘Union’ and where did you record it?

[Andy] The first 2 minutes of the track Union were written in July 2016, so we’ll say it’s been just under 3 years of writing and recording. The only things that weren’t recorded/produced at Phil’s are anything I did on my PC at home and the vocals, which were recorded at the college where I used to study.

[Phil} We started seriously putting ideas together during the summer of 2016. There’s the odd riff that I’d written before, the main riff of Union for example, not to mention the whole of Parhelion (previously released in on youtube under the name Dystopia in 2016), but largely everything on the album was written with the sole intention of being on it.

Aside from vocals, which Andy did at the music college he was attending at the time, nothing was recorded externally. I tracked guitars into a DI box in my bedroom, and every synth/fx noise was created either in mine or Andy’s DAW.

There was periods of time spanning several weeks during these past 3 years where neither of us worked on the music at all, but I think that ultimately helped in keeping us both interested in it.

What has been the biggest challenge when creating ‘Union’?

[Andy] Trying to glue all the bits together and to keep the tracks interesting. And also staring at one section for way too long trying to figure out how to get past it or fill in the gaps.

[Clark] Keeping the forward momentum constant - we've all had dips in productivity at one time or another, and it can be hard to drag yourself out of that. Ultimately we've kept at it because we're part of a bigger team, and we're all relying on one another. And for me, the confidence I have in the material we're working on definitely helps.

[Phil] Logistically, finding the time and motivation to keep working on it around everything else in all our lives. We’re all in full time work or education, so time and energy have always been in limited supply.

Musically, we just didn’t want the album to be boring or predictable. If there was an idea that was too cheesy or that we found ourselves skipping past to get to the next section, then we ultimately just cut it. It was challenging to finish the songs when we held ourselves to such high standards.

How did it feel to have the singles so well received?

[Andy] Incredibly encouraging. Reanimate was released during an incredibly difficult period of time for me, so seeing the response from it was a huge boost and really started to make it feel like all the work that we’d kept hidden from everyone from years was beginning to pay off.

[Clark] It's amazing, really flattering. When you put so much work into something, having that immediate response is one of the most gratifying things I've ever felt.

[Phil] It’s incredibly validating, like the work we’ve been doing for the last 3 years HASN’T been for absolutely nothing. It also incited mild panic, what if we’ve released the only good 12 minutes on the album and the rest of it sucked? But we’ve put exactly the same amount of care into every other song, there’s no filler, every second has been thought about. So we’re confident and just excited for everyone to hear the rest of our work.

Where did you draw inspiration for ‘Union’?

[Andy] Musically, I was very inspired by the album ‘Coal’ by Leprous. A lot of synth sounds and vocal melodies from there were very driving to the sound I wanted to achieve. Lyrically, I suppose ‘Coal’ was also quite a big influence still as I feel there’s a lot of vagueness to the writing.

[Clark] First, as a drummer, I have your standard suite of modern prog influences: Baard Kolstad (Leprous), Matt Halpern (Periphery), Blake Richardson (Between The Buried And Me) and Tomas Haake (Meshuggah) are all extraordinarily creative players, and influential to me in different ways. My playing sounds like all that thrown into a blender, which altogether isn't that unique: there are plenty of drummers, better than me, that are made of the same basic ingredients.

The second way I'd take this question is as a programmer. Programming midi is a separate art unto itself, one that's taken me a long time to even be semi-competent at: people like David Maxim Micic, Sithu Aye, Acle Kahney (Tesseract) take that art to the next level. Their composition, velocity editing and mixing are all so perfect, it makes me want to keep learning and improving.

[Phil] It’s always kind of felt like the lovechild of Leprous and TesseracT to me; when we started working together I had Altered State and Polaris on heavy rotation, and most of my riff writing was based around that. Andy got me listening to Coal and The Congregation and the sound of those albums really sparked creativity in me, so what we ended up with was tight groovy riffs with Leprous-y synths over the top of them. That’s the Union sound for me.

What is your creative/writing process like individually and as a group?

[Andy] Writing by myself usually results in me having long periods of nothingness, followed by a short but very, very productive burst of ideas and sounds. This is probably a big part of why the album took so long to get done, but I’ve yet to find a way to bottle that energy. As a group, it’s hard to say as we’ve only been together a few times in person to actually play music! From our experiences so far, I think we do better with creating when we’ve retreated into our own spaces with plenty of time to think and appropriately craft something, though I imagine this will begin to even out the other way the more we work together in person.

[Clark] We usually flesh out ideas as much as we can individually before bringing them to the table - it's quite a solitary writing process compared to other bands I've been in, but it works for us.

Typically I'd record video on my electric drum kit and send it over for judgement. I'll take on any points and changes, then write up the drums in guitar pro - I find it easier working with drum notation than with blocks of midi. That gets sent to Phil, who sets up the tracks in Superior Drummer and GGD. I go over the velocities to fine tune them, which involves setting every single midi note manually, and that's my part over.

The last song is fifteen minutes, so I didn't want to use the same approach and have it take forever. Instead I recorded the midi directly into Superior Drummer using my electric kit. It took some tweaking to get right.

[Phil] It’ll start with a riff, chord sequence, theme or sound from me or Andy. If it sparks creativity or seems like it COULD end up being something good, then it starts to get worked on by anyone. There’s no personal ideas, once it’s in the band, anyone can do anything to it, and ultimately I think that’s how we get the Ihlo sound, we all get our hands on it one way or another.

Personally, my creative process is incredibly inconsistent. Parhelion wrote itself and flowed beautifully, Starseeker wrote itself and was done in 2 or 3 days. Union was unfinished with entirely missing sections, scrapped choruses, scrapped breakdowns, for nearly 2 years. It’s hard to get out of the rut when you’re stuck on one section for so long.

We have never written anything as a group in person, and I don’t think that we ever will. Maybe the odd riff or chord sequence, but that’s not how we craft the songs.

Can you explain the narrative/concept behind Union? Did you have the idea in the beginning or did it develop with the song writing?

[Andy] It did originally begin as a concept with some sort of storyline in mind and there’s still some remnants of that throughout, but it ended up becoming a bit more thematic in concept to me as the vocals began to really come together across the whole album. The general themes of it are about loneliness and trying to cope with deep emotional pitfalls in your life, with the idea that love and being connected with someone else can save you from these really devastating feelings. It was never meant to have an intentionally bleak feeling but it just naturally poured out that way in what I think was an extremely necessary process of catharsis. It has some moments that I think can really lift you up emotionally and other parts that are very unapologetic about dragging you down.

[Phil] There’s no traditional narrative, only hints at a very vague story, but there’s definitely an overarching theme of loneliness and abandonment, with uplifting overtones of togetherness that are few and far between. Even though I had no hand in the lyric writing, I definitely draw inspiration from negative emotions, and have no problem with trying to portray that through music.

Has Union taken any massive changes along the way, or is it what you had in mind from the beginning?

[Andy] The only thing I can really think of is that we did originally set out to write and release an EP. Reanimate was part of it, as well as a near 20-minute length track that we ended up scrapping. As more tracks started coming together we just went for the full album instead.

[Phil] When it was just Andy and I working on it, we had 3 good song ideas. One which is basically the finished version of Reanimate, one which was 15 minutes long and ultimately scrapped since finishing Reanimate made it clear we wanted to go a different direction musically, and one that we’ve still got in the reserves for future use. It was the original idea to release these 3 as an EP, then suddenly Starseeker appeared out of the blue, Andy had the idea of taking a song from my Iris EP, Omega, and remaking that into Triumph, and the 1 riff we had from Union kept calling to us. Since we’d already scrapped 15 minutes of the EP, we just started from scratch and started working on all these new exciting songs that made up a good 35 minutes of music. Hollow and Coalescence were added later onto the tracklist to round out a good album length.

What is your favourite song conceptually and what is your favourite song technically on the album?

[Andy] Conceptually, probably Starseeker. I like the themes of the track, the idea of it beginning as this very mechanical and electronic-influenced thing and opening up into a grand organic sound in the second half. The entire ending has so far never failed to elicit some sort of emotional response from me. Technically, probably Parhelion, just because it’s super chunky.

[Clark] Conceptually it'd have to be Hollow. I connect with that song very deeply - the beautiful, haunting sadness just makes me feel every time I hear it. Andy put so much emotion into the vocals, it rips me up in the best way.

Technically it's Parhelion all the way. I wouldn't describe any of the songs as particularly technical, but the grooves and riffs on that track are belters. It's always an absolute pleasure to play.

[Phil] The ending section of Hollow might be my favourite part on the album and feels like the culmination of all the negative themes on the album. It’s an emotional high point and Andy’s vocals in particular are such an explosion of desperate energy. After a restrained first 5 minutes of the song it’s incredibly impactful.

Favourite song technically has to be Parhelion, shit’s just too good from start to finish. Saying that, Coalescence was the last song to be finished so it’s the one I’ve listened to the least - and it’s quickly rising in my ranking of the songs. Ask me again in 3 months.

What does Union mean to you each on a personal level, do you view the songs in different ways to each other?

[Andy] It just feels like a really solid refinement of something unspoken between myself, Phil & Clark. We didn’t really know each other at all before we started working on this and we didn’t anticipate that it would unite us in the way it did. What is essentially an internet band somehow being held together without any real obligation other than the want to just make something cool is such a pure experience to me.

[Clark] We all see the album in different ways, it's very open to interpretation. For me it's about love and loss, grief, but also growth and acceptance. It's like the painful catharsis of knowing with certainty where your problems lie, even if you don't like it.

[Phil] Union has been my emotional output since the start, whether I’ve wanted it to be or not. I love creating stuff for others to see or hear, and pouring a part of myself into it and having it be recieved so positively just fills me with positivity, so I guess you could say there has been some return on emotional investment.

In terms of Ihlo as a whole, what it has come to mean is this connection that Andy, Clark and I have now. Creating an album is hard work, and there’s plenty of getting frustrated with each other, but it’s never taken to heart and the intention is never from a bad place. We’ve gone from meeting in some Facebook meme groups to having the best working relationship I’ve ever had, and made some pretty sweet friends along the way. Awwww.

And finally, if one of you were to become prime minister of Great Britain, who would it be and why?

[Andy] I feel like I’d be able to muster up the best marketing campaign to get elected in the first place, the other guys wouldn’t be able to compete with my levels of memes and nonsense.

[Clark] Phil and Andy are both too camera-shy, so I guess it'd have to be me. My manifesto is to make Ihlo mandatory for all citizens. Cast your ballots.

[Phil] Gotta be Andy. He has the support of the people and animals alike.

Thanks so much to Phil, Andy and Clark for doing this interview, hope this answered most questions!

- James Carstairs