Dutch prog-death maestros Pestilence are heading Down Under next month; This, of course, is a matter for some celebration and we couldn’t let it pass without sending Leeno Dee for a chat with the band’s inspirational frontman Patrick Mameli to find out more…

Patrick -how are you? “Yeah, I’ve been great man, working hard a lot, eating healthy, so I’m…yeah I’m pretty decent. Pretty good”.

You’re certainly looking pretty healthy. “Yeah I have to man, you know I’m turning fifty seven I think this year in November so I’m getting up there man, getting up there!”

And are you still based in The Netherlands? “Yeah, but we’re in the works of moving to Thailand. So that is going to be my new home because The Netherlands taxes… sixty to sixty five per cent  now! And also they’re making it very difficult for people who are their own boss like me, just doing music, trying to take more money from you, so you know, its no longer affordable to live in the Netherlands so I’m moving to Thailand where…(makes happy face) everything seems to be better!”

Well if anything you’ll be much closer to Australia so maybe we’ll see more of Pestilence over here! (Smiling) “Yes. Definitely”.

Are you on tour at the moment? “No, at the moment I’m in my studio recording for the new album, Portals“.

That’s been a long time coming, yes? “Definitely. It’s been in the making for a long time ‘coz you know, whenever I get the chance and have some time off I start composing right away and then, record little bits, snippets and then when its time to record an album I have to go through this library of all these riffs that I have and then I start putting stuff together. And its been a blast because I think this is my best work yet. You know, always trying to become a better musician and evolve, as a musician, and never look back because something I’ve noticed is especially the metal heads, they tend to love parts of their youth where they listened to some music that they still adore up to now. And for me as a musician I never wanna look back, I always try, you know, to see what I can still do and be of any significance to the metal scene myself”.

I guess yes, the temptation for most artists would be to fall back on previous catalogue, which is of course important, but sometimes at the expense of moving forward with new material. “Yeah definitely. Look at it as a painter – some painters have a distinctive style, but if they wanna do a different (style) of painting people are not gonna accept it because they’re so used to the kind of painting that this guy did before… and it’s the same with music. Actually its sometimes somewhat of a frustration where I want to break out of the boundaries that any music scene creates itself to be labelled… you know, this is this type of music and this is this type of music. Now, back in the day, everything was very simple. Back in the eighties you had your heavy metal, you had your melodic metal, you had thrash, death metal and that was pretty much the spectrum”.

Now we have all kinds of different… Subgenres? “Yeah, and the thing is it gets a real blur, and this came actually with the internet where there is so much information out there it’s almost very hard to decide what you like and if you like everything you have not enough time in your lifespan to get to know all that stuff because there’s just so much out there now”.

True. There’s so much material out there now it can prove difficult to wade through the deadwood and find the good stuff. “Yeah definitely – and not only that but also I think that these young kids, they don’t even know where death metal originated from, right? I mean my own kids don’t even know what a tape is! Cassette tapes…I guess we live now in a swipe generation where every thing has to be done now (emphasises urgency) you know, the gratification has to be now”.

Whereas for me the whole process of composing music, is as golden as to perform live. “And then once you realise that… I’m nothing more than out of the body. Or I’m nothing more than some of the songs on Testimony (album Testimony of The Ancients, 1991), it sometimes makes me sad because after Spheres ( album,1993) we’ve done so much. Every album has been a progression from the previous one”.

True. In fact Pestilence I don’t think has ever done two albums that sound the same. “Exactly”.

You went from a punky, raw metal to death to prog with jazz elements. And a lot of bands do stick to a formula that works commercially. “Yeah definitely and plus – you know – they’re billionaires! And I’m left out of fucking money because I’ve always tried to become a better version of myself, and record labels see me as a nightmare because… how can they promote the next album if they have no clue how its going to sound? And I very much admire the late Allan Holdsworth (virtuoso jazz/rock guitarist) who once said ‘I never listen to my own material because it just makes me wanna throw up because I’m a different person now’ The things he’d done were in the moment like taking a picture of that particular moment and he doesn’t like to look back at those photographs, he just like to continue and keep on creating…and I think he’s the greatest, greatest guitar player ever. Everybody talks about Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and all these other guys and bless their souls but c’mon man this guy was a fucking genius and nobody recognises it”.

In the late eighties Edward Van Halen was a Holdsworth fan and tried to make him more known to the public but it just never worked. He was just never going to be a commercial property. “Yeah, he’s a musician’s guy you know, like people that really analyse like, ‘now he’s playing this chord shape and now…’ I do get it, I do understand that when you go to a show and you pay good money you wanna be entertained and not use your brain so much over what chord progression somebody is playing -that’s just for the jazz freaks out there. So I do understand and that’s why its always difficult for me to make music that I actually like and the audience would love as well. So that’s the thing”.

Of course – you yourself need to like it first. “Right! I have to play these songs for the rest of my life so you know sometimes I really get frustrated and I like to switch things up a little bit to make it a little bit more interesting for myself and then people say ‘well they don’t play it exactly like the album’ so (the audience thinks) they must be making a mistake or something has changed because of the different musicians that I use. This is also a thing, is that the musicians that I use now have a very much different impact on my music than the older guys that I’ve used in the band so its always like… sometimes its a struggle to get your point across when we’re actually trying to do something and play something that is very special for us and hopefully for the fans as well”.

Well, you can look yourself in the mirror and feel good about your reasons for doing what you do with integrity. “Yeah! Definitely. And also, times have changed especially with all these platforms on the Internet now. Back in the day you had to go (vent) to a magazine and they’d read that and think, ‘OK maybe its not such a good idea to post (print) this and now you have your Blabbermouth you have your whatever its called… Metal Sucks?! I mean why would you call it Metal Sucks? So what the fuck is that? And so anybody can vent and say bullshit and some people I guess may understand what that’s all about but there’s a lot of people that do not understand and maybe take it for granted that ‘oh yeah, this band is like this’, when they’re not”.

Tell me about Levels of Perception (he band’s latest release, a re-recorded career overview album)-what was the motivation behind that? “Yeah, like I said, we always try to experiment a little bit with the songs and you know, some people have complained about the production, you know, sound wise, but we really wanted to go back and… maybe… the record label should have made it more clear, that we wanted to go back to the old days where you were making demos because it sounds more raw and… (the verdict was) I changed my voice around and that was not good, then the album cover was AI and then that was not good… That album cover for us was like, satirical, it was making fun of ourselves in a pretty cool way I thought… it changed our faces and made it really creepy… it’s online, check it out. But our fans really disliked it because they have this idea that you can only have death metal covers if they’re made by Dan Seagrave (British artist specialising in death metal) and other painters, right? So, we’ve done that, and also – what do you think a painting from Dan Seagrave costs now? Almost our whole budget! So a lot of the time, people don’t know the background things. So (anyway) we just wanted to make a raw album and that’s what we did”.

And as we discussed earlier, you also have the long awaited new studio album in the works, Portals. “Now, Portals will be something else because – as we’re talking my computer is on and I was checking the riffs – and this one sounds exactly the way the fans want it”.

How so? “Because it’s going to take you back to the really raw and brutal Pestilence that… people love. The vocals are going to be brutal – it’s going to be ultra technical, but yet, still understandable”.

So a new take on the classic sound? “Yeah, it’s trying to reinvent Pestilence from a different point of view and I think it’s going to be a killer album. For sure”.

When you tour Australia later this year, will we hear any material from Portals in the set? “Well not really, no. Because we are still in the midst of the recording so the album is not done yet.
And what I always do is when I compose music I always leave room for change (smiling) so as we’re listening to the songs I might come up with a different idea so… it’s not written in stone yet.
But its there. All the thirteen songs are done but I always leave room for something else. And I think we have so much material that it would be a shame not to play something from the first album, the second album, third, fourth, fifth. It’s going to be some stuff from everything.

So you’re the kind of guy that keeps changing stuff right until the final mix is done, right? “Oh yeah! And especially, playing solos, my leads. I never practise anything. I just know my scales and I have different views on how something could sound so I just throw it out there keeping the wow factor because a lot of bands before they go into the studio they rehearse their songs to death. So there is no more soul in the songs because you’ve done it so many times and it’ll sound good for the listener but that little edge that little enthusiasm is very important for us- that every time you discover something new in the music.

When you tour these days, coming to Australia for example, gear wise, do you travel light? “Well yeah-some of the backline like especially drums and things like that will be provided but I swear by my little Kemper Stage (floor based amp/ effects Profiling guitar pedal ) and I have my little guitar with me-(picks up custom Steinberger styled guitar) which is this tiny little thing right here. Like I said I love Allan Holdsworth and his guitars always were very ergonomic and I can just put that in my back pack and take it with me on the plane so you don’t have all these fancy (guitars) and then they just throw them around on the plane so… I just take two little things with me and some clothing and I’m good to go!”

On your way to Australia, in November, is it straight here or will there be other shows along the way? Like Japan perhaps? “No, it’s going to be Australia, and after those shows we’re going to Mexico, on the other side of the world, and do this huge Metalfest. And then I’m going with my wife to Hong Kong and have a little vacation. And see a bit of Thailand, and then next year we’re going to do a full blown Asian tour. So that’s when we’ll do Japan and all these other places that we haven’t been to in a little while, yeah”.

You’ve worked the USA quite a bit too in the past. Is that still a market for you? “Yeah we’ve been there many times; the last time we were supposed to tour there was when COVID hit which was a bummer but I’ve been there three or four times before and I do enjoy going there and I don’t know about Australia yet but the most awesome fans are in Latin America, for sure, South America is… because these people, they work hard to buy a ticket, for them it’s a lot of money and it really really means something whereas here in the Netherlands you can see any band, European, American bands and its all just there for grabs. And you know we’re not even that popular in the Netherlands ourselves. We have to always go abroad where people seem to enjoy Pestilence way more and like I said the fans in Chile, Argentina, Brazil… I mean come on man, its over the top”.

I’m hoping the Australian fans will give them a run for their money!

Pestilence with Abramelin and Alarum performing at:
Nov 6th – Brisbane, The Triffid
Nov 7th – Sydney, Crowbar
Nov 8th – Canberra, The Baso*
Nov 9th – Adelaide, Froth & Fury Festival**
Nov 10th – Melbourne, Max Watts
*Abramelin not Appearing
**Abramelin and Alarum not appearing