One of the most original bands out there, Riverside have long drawn from a wealth influences to craft albums that truly take the listener on a journey. Nominally progressive, although the band themselves disparage the term, Riverside are, in reality, hard to pigeonhole as they cover every base from electronica to metal across the course of their varied albums. Returning with a new album some three years since the remarkable love, fear and the time machine, much has changed in the Riverside camp. The devastating loss of founding member Piotr Grudzinski resulted in the band opting to continue as a trio, with official touring members augmenting the group outside of the studio. As it turns out, however, for Mariusz Duda, the turmoil did not end there. We caught up with him by phone, just prior to the release of the stunning wasteland (a sure-fire candidate for one of the albums of the year) and he spoke candidly about the events that led up to the release of Riverside’s enigmatic seventh album.
First of all, it’s a real pleasure to have Riverside back. Obviously you’ve been through a difficult time and it’s been a while since you were last in the studio, so it’s great to be welcoming you back with a new album and a new deal with Inside Out.
Thank you, we’re glad too…
Obviously the record, this time round, you described it as a much more serious, more mature outing, with a darker and more complex emotional feel to it and you focused on a narrative arc that’s dystopian – the wasteland image – have you approached it as a full-blown concept record, or is it more a thematic linking across songs?
Exactly, this is more like a thematic album about trying to survive in the world that ended. My favourite, post-apocalyptic subject, but I wouldn’t call it as a concept album. No, it’s just like the album is about one subject, mostly.
When you were developing the lyrical themes to the record, was there a process where you were deliberately angling this towards the specific concept, or did the songs develop organically and then you realised that underlying theme had emerged?
I have a pattern – all the time the same. It doesn’t matter if I’m working on the new Riverside album or the new Lunatic Soul album, it’s still the same. Like, I start with the blank page and first I have to have a general concept, or the idea about what the album should be. Later, I need a colour for the cover and I need the title and when I have all these things, I start to compose the songs, alone or with the guys or some other people. So, that’s the process and it’s the same with Wasteland. When I found the idea for this, I started to compose the songs.
In terms of the idea, you’re influenced not just by other bands, but also by literature and even by computer games in creating the subject matter for the songs?
Yes, yes exactly. These are my influences. I don’t know – music doesn’t influence me like it used to do, especially in Riverside, because I don’t listen to that kind of music anymore. I try to find musical influences somewhere else, mostly in some soundtrack or, I don’t know, electronic music but not classic rock or progressive rock, that’s not my cup of tea anymore. But anyway, when it comes to Riverside albums, I always try to read a lot, play a lot of that kind of stuff. All this post-apocalyptic stuff, that just influenced me many, many years ago. I just thought that now, under the circumstances that have happened… Let’s say… in riverside we had sort of the end of the world, so I thought that would be the perfect idea for this album and I started to use this subject.
In terms of creating the music, you did a compilation album a couple of years back – eye of the soundscape – which bought together your instrumental and ambient pieces. When you’re creating music like that, do you have a landscape or vista in mind, because much of it is very evocative?
Well, I grew up on electronic music. I grew up on instrumental music. My first records were Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre – that kind of music, I always tried to hear this in a journey way and it is the same with the albums – I always try to compose the albums so that you can listen from the beginning until the end. The album should have a beginning, it should have at least two turning points and at the final point, you know, some closure. It’s important to me and when I do instrumental pieces, I always imagine myself somewhere, in a weird world and I try to do the soundtrack for the road, I suppose. Instrumental music for me is like a journey in music.
So, taking that through into this album, into Wasteland, was it a similar process because, certainly the single you released, takes the listener through a number of different landscapes before it reaches its resolution.
Wasteland for me is just like a road movie. You know, when I started to do the songs, for example, I wanted to change something. Because we didn’t have Piotr on board anymore, so I had to think about what to do with no guitar playing because we became a trio on this album and I had to play the guitar, this time. But fortunately, I also have some sort of piccolo bass which sometimes sounds like the guitar, so it’s hard to say if we have guitar or if we have bass and it’s also hard to say who’s playing what. I also try to use the guests on this album. But anyway, I wanted to do this album as a soundtrack to a movie, a post-apocalyptic theme for me, it’s really connected with some western movies. There’s lots of space and that’s why I made the ideas, this time, a bit different in their influences. Like those Spaghetti Western movies, but in general I just wanted a story with this introduction, like Acid Rain or Veil of Tears, and then later to just show that the normal, classic Riverside (if I can say that), full of melancholy and full of contrast, with hard stuff and mellow stuff. But this time I wanted it in a more rough way, a more rusty way, and a more organic way. The post-apocalyptic story, so I abandoned all these electronic influences because I didn’t imagine that they’d fit, so I went back to roots – the guitar is the most basic instrument on this album and then some other stuff like violins and different kinds of singing. In general, I think it’s a really spacey album and it’s really like a soundtrack.
As someone who grew up on a lot of progressive rock and, really, bands that wrote albums that take the listener on a journey – I think that sequencing a record is very important and is almost an unsung art. Writing the songs is one aspect, but then to develop them to become an album is another; when you were writing, how long did it take to sequence the record to make the journey that you wanted, and did you end up leaving anything out, or did you include everything that you wrote?
I think I should start it from the beginning. Wasteland is another album influenced by all these tragic things that happened in my life in 2016. Piotr passed away, my father passed away, I got divorced, my mum got sick and all that kind of stuff – it was lots and lots of unpleasant things, so I just closed myself in the studio and first I was working on my solo project, which is called Lunatic soul, and I created the album, fractured, which is how to deal with some unpleasant things in your life. Later, I wanted to do the new Riverside, but somehow I started another Lunatic Soul album – under the fragmented sky – because I thought that I hadn’t said the last word and I was kind of postponing the new Riverside because I was searching for the idea for that. And, when I finally found the idea, the music just came up. It was around October / November that I started to compose the songs and suddenly I had fifty minutes of brand-new music. I skipped the electronic influences this time and I stayed mostly on the acoustic playing. Fortunately Michael, our keyboard player, also had some stuff, so he added to my collection for the album, and it was really natural for me and so funny because within one year I simply did three albums, which is a lot. Lunatic Soul’s fractured was released on Oct 6th and Wasteland is Sept 28th, which means within one year I released a lot of albums and that was my main influence, mostly. I did just did that, sitting in the studio all the time. It’s weird, but subconsciously… because I thought all this dark stuff I’d do with the Lunatic Soul albums, but subconsciously, I approached this inner scream and this darkness and the most melancholic stuff was waiting for me for the Riverside album, and I realised that when I finished the demo and when we started the recording. So, within two months I’d almost done everything.
I guess, with the writing comes a certain degree of catharsis, but at the same time there’s a need to make it relatable to a wider audience and that’s part of the challenge that comes with writing an album like this.
I guess so. They say the biggest art comes from unhappiness and, in my case, I did, not one, but three albums. But it’s like a closure and I think that all this stuff that I wanted to deal with, I already have. So, it’s more like the beginning of a new chapter – it’s more than just dealing with the past. It’s like, “OK, we have the end of the world, now It’s time to survive in a foreign land – a wasteland”. Besides, it’s not only about that. It’s kind of multi-dimensional album – it’s really symbolic. It’s about the situation in the band but also, I hope, the situation in the world. For some people, the Wasteland could be like Poland or Europe and that’s how I wanted to express the story. To have two meanings – two layers.
When you see the world in such turmoil, you start to see artists responding to those external influences and certainly the situation across Europe is quite dire, but it gives artists something with which to engage and to take something positive from what appears quite negative.
Of course. You know, I never wanted to play in politics. I focus, lyrically, on that psychological point of view – that’s what is important for me. But in a certain way, something happened and the whole situation was reflected in the things that I do and that’s why Fractured, the lunatic soul album, was about things that fracture – mentally – but it was connected, for instance, with this idea of a divided Europe. Because we are really divided in these years and we’ve started to close ourselves in our small communities rather than be one big nation like some people planned in the past and exactly the same is here in Poland. People are really divided in these years and we’ve never been this divided nationally as we are now, and so I wanted to mark it. I still wanted to keep my psychological point of view – I didn’t want to write about politics. Anyway, the production of the album, it kind of… tracks like veil of tears are covers of the future end of the world – the politics and the religion and some people that use politics or use religion in the wrong way – that’s very dangerous for the future, so we need to be careful of course, and that’s why I wanted to mark that – so it’s sort of political and veil of tears is sort of about religion and the church. But the rest is just about surviving and the normal Riverside lyrics, or my lyrics, return.
That narrative that flows through the album feeds very nicely into presentation in terms of the artwork and it’s good to note that it’s Travis Smith once again doing the cover…
Yes, he’s a part of our team – we do all the things together. It’s the same with our team of sound engineers and people who do the video – you know, I don’t want to compare us to Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg, but this is what I really like – Steven Spielberg always works with Janusz Kaminski, for instance, or Martin Scorsese with Leonardo DiCaprio and that kind of stuff. So, we always work with Travis because we like it and because we can create all the time something new. So, Travis did it again and I, again, was bugging him and saying to him “please do this in a different way” and “do this in a different way!” But we finally have this final cover and the idea for the artwork, so I’m really happy with the final result.
Like a lot of Riverside packaging, it looks amazing and I think it’s going to look really cool when it comes out on vinyl. It’s an important part, I think, of the Riverside experience – it’s an overall package.
Yes, I always try to package… to do the nice package for my musical universe, if I can say that. It’s a part of that – how it looks like and how it stands visually. I think, I started more and more with some visuals recently, so I hope that kind of part will be developed in the future too. With Riverside, we’re going to release the new video for the song Lament and I think it is, maybe OK, maybe after 02 panic room and found. That will be the third, really, really good video. I believe it will be the best one so far. Finally, I feel that I will be happy with the result, so I’m really looking forward to see this entirely.
In Poland, there was a very strong progressive music community – is it still the case that it’s a very popular genre?
I wouldn’t say that now. We still have the same amounts of progressive fans. Of course, we have the prog community, which is really nice, we’ve got some prog festivals here and there’s always 500 or 1000 people, but it’s not a festival for 10,000 people. It’s kind of a small community and Riverside is funny… we’re an exception in our country because I always say out loud that I don’t want to be a strictly progressive band, I’m rather trying to escape from that. There are some things that don’t sound like normal progressive rock music and I do hope that wasteland proves to be even more alternative this time than ‘progressive metal’ or whatever. But anyway, yeah, people like that kind of music. Here in Poland, probably this is because, in the past, we had lots of very nice things on the radio – very nice programmes – and most of the iconic journalists – the iconic voices – they were glorifying that kind of music. We kind of grew up on Pink Floyd and Marillion and that kind of stuff, so this progressive style is OK. But, we’re not so proggy as, for instance, people in Holland! So, it’s still somewhere in some communities, yeah.
I always took ‘progressive’ to mean music that is forward looking and willing to embrace change, but I know that the term, for some people, can also mean ‘bands that sound vaguely like Genesis’, so I know it’s a difficult term to throw about.
Maybe I don’t like the term ‘progressive metal’ because I think there is… there’s a website called prog archives and we are labelled ‘progressive metal’ – and they are still calling us that way even if we released albums like Eye of the soundscape, and people are writing “what kind of metal is that?!” We don’t play progressive metal. For me, Riverside plays melancholic rock – that’s my genre and sometimes it’s harder and sometimes it’s softer but it’s always melancholic rock or, simply, rock music with some progressive elements. This is what I really like to see myself – if I have to be labelled by someone.
That’s always the problem with labels – it pleases as many people as it pisses others off! I was speaking with a friend recently, and he told me that ELP, for example, hated the term ‘progressive’…
You know, this is something that I always wanted to do. I wanted to just bring Riverside in the direction that Riverside is the genre – the great example for me is Depeche Mode. Some people can say that this is the band that plays electronic music or electronic pop or whatever, but suddenly they just became themselves – they were their own genre. And this is the thing – to go in this direction. Speaking of progressive music – for me. I don’t know, I just find it pretty boring listening to it. I mean, that’s something that I don’t really feel enthusiastic about. I can divide the new bands into two groups. Of course we’ve got this classic 70s / 80s vibe or whatever – that’s fine. Some bands are still playing and I’m very happy with that. SO, for the new bands – there are the post-classical bands who want to sound like the bands form the past which I’m not a huge fan of. I’m not only talking about Genesis – Inside Out has lots of that kind of band. And, anyway, there’s a different fan, which I’m also not a huge fan of, which is djent – post djent or whatever. It’s really technical, really progressive but it’s also sometimes with some fake drums. The guitar player needs to have seven or eight strings to play that and the vocalist is singing [adopts high pitched, airy tones in the style of Muse] all the time the same, with some very weird vibe. And for me the most progressive bands are those that simply don’t like this term. I don’t know, some other label – maybe call it post-progressive but the farther you are from this the more progressive you are likely to sound and I just want to find Riverside somewhere outside this normal progressive sound. I think that Emerson Lake and Palmer, with all due respect, they were progressive as hell and we are far, far from that.
Just to wrap this up – you’re returning to the UK for a short tour –
Yes, we’re planning a bigger tour this time. It starts in mid-October and we’ll be playing bigger venues with a bigger production and, because we’re a trip, probably on the stage there’ll be five people at some moments. So we’ve changed and, at this moment, we’re preparing lots of surprises. So, I’m really looking forward to be there and to see all these people who are going to come and see us – it’ll be a blast.
