ROBERT ALLEN of Melbourne tech-metallers THE ABANDONMENT talks to JODY MACGREGOR about their debut album.

JODY MACGREGOR: Have Melbourne’s recent venue closures affected you?

ROBERT ALLEN: Funny you ask that, our drummer Joel [Taylor] and I were just at the SLAM Protest Rally this afternoon. To say that the venue closures and all of the other issues going on with Liquor Licensing and Noise Complaints doesn’t affect us, would be an impossibility. Every single band of any make-up or genre is affected by this down here. Although the Laws were somewhat withdrawn or relaxed last night, this in every way is still destroying live music in Victoria. I, along with two of the other members in the band, grew up in regional Victoria with little if any venues that would support live original music. It is hard here, but so much harder in the smaller towns. The hardest part as I personally see it, is the amount of urban development and rezoning that is happening.

JM: What made you decide on a concept album for your album, Ephemeral?

RA: Since doing our EP Deja Disparu in 2006 we have been talking about a concept album in some capacity or another. To me, a concept really presents an album as a single piece of art. We wanted this to be something we put all of ourselves into and we wanted to work just as hard on the art, the lyrics and the story as we did the music.

JM: Can you explain the concept of Ephemeral?

RA: Ephemeral is a story set throughout different time periods surrounding one event. This event is a catastrophe beyond all we have seen before. It is the end of the world as seen through many sets of eyes and felt through many hearts. We wanted to tell a story without judgment, without superiority in our thought. It is simply the stories of people all over the world dealing with the end of everything they know and love. Our drummer Joel presented the basic idea to us from the 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio, meaning ‘Life Out Of Balance’. It is a movie of no dialogue, just music and imagery. It details the natural earth and the industrial earth and starkly presents the enormous difference between the two. 

THE ABANDONMENT play at Shed 5 on the Gold Coast, Friday Mar 5 (all ages), Fat Louie’s on Saturday Mar 6 and The Valley PCYC on Sunday Mar 7 (all ages). www.myspace.com/theabandonment

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