The making of the Misery album was an intense process. I worked on this album in total isolation, with no creative interaction with other
people for a period of two years. I began with a lot of ideas. Musically, I wanted to make an album that would break Dumbass out of the
industrial-noise-rock box. I wanted the album to do everything. I wanted to make an album that explored so much musical ground, that
afterwards, anything I wanted to do would make perfect sense. So the album needed industrial-noise-rock, in fact, it needed to push
that even further. But it also needed to be mellower than anything I’d ever done. It needed to do all sorts of things that I’d never done.
After 2 full years of work I had about 6 hours of completed music… and I don’t even know how much I scrapped.
I also went into this album with an extremely complicated concept, which made for very strict and difficult working conditions. The album
deals with symbols, and specifically (though not limited to) those representing change. At its most basic level, the album is about
change, the painful, difficult, cyclical and yet progressive process of change. The album is about death and life, about rebirth and
repetition, about evolution, weakness, strength, pain, joy, etc. For maximum effect, play both discs of the album, one after the other, on
repeat (the album is designed to flow in a continuous cycle).
Zeke Mason
Misery (2000)
The Misery album took just over two years to write and record. I started working on it ideas for it in September of 1998 and finished it in December of 2000. In the early years Dumbass was a pretty aggressive noise rock band. For the next Dumbass album I wanted to push things a lot further in a lot of different directions. I had been reading a lot of comparative mythology at the time and wanted to create a large-scale concept album about the process of change, told through a mythological cycle of death and rebirth. I wanted to use the sort of symbolic story-telling methods that are observed in world mythology to talk about the concept of change in the abstract, to tell a story in archetypes that was actually about something more basic than narrative itself.
I started by working out the sort of symbols and archetypes I would use, and then the stages of the death and rebirth story. I knew it was going to be a double album that formed a cycle, where the first disc led directly to the second and the second led directly back to the first. I had the idea that someone could put the two cds into a cd changer on repeat and one would flow into the other and back to the first and on and on an on…
I was still a teenager when I started writing this album and I can hear that when I listen to it, but it’s still an album that I’m proud of.
Here’s what I wrote about it in 2004 or so:
“The making of the Misery album was an intense process. I worked on this album in total isolation, with no creative interaction with other people for a period of two years. I began with a lot of ideas. Musically, I wanted to make an album that would break Dumbass out of the
industrial-noise-rock box. I wanted the album to do everything. I wanted to make an album that explored so much musical ground, that afterwards, anything I wanted to do would make perfect sense. So the album needed industrial-noise-rock, in fact, it needed to push that even further. But it also needed to be mellower than anything I’d ever done. It needed to do all sorts of things that I’d never done. After 2 full years of work I had about 6 hours of completed music… and I don’t even know how much I scrapped.
I also went into this album with an extremely complicated concept, which made for very strict and difficult working conditions. The album deals with symbols, and specifically (though not limited to) those representing change. At its most basic level, the album is about change, the painful, difficult, cyclical and yet progressive process of change. The album is about death and life, about rebirth and repetition, about evolution, weakness, strength, pain, joy, etc. For maximum effect, play both discs of the album, one after the other, on repeat (the album is designed to flow in a continuous cycle).
Zeke Mason”
Tracks:
Disc 1:
01 Incipio (in medias res)
02 Cold Fate03 Burning in my Dreams (Annihilate)04 When05 Fall06 10 Seconds07 The Way08 Strength09 Quiet10 Wondering how far down11 Submerge12 I’d be13 Belong14 Grey15 Surrender16 The Dying God17 The Void
If you can, listen to the whole album straight through, on repeat. The last song on the first disc leads directly to the first song on the second disc, and the last song on the second disc leads directly into the first song on the first disc. The album as a whole forms a continuous loop.
Disc 2:
01 In the Belly of the Beast
02 The Return
03 Disillusioned
04 The Chills of Memory
05 Strength from Weakness
06 Nine
07 Ascent
08 Atrophy
09 Blue
10 “The Chimes at Midnight”
11 Green
12 Archetype
13 The Living
14 The Nothing
15 Altered Now
16 Faithless Still
17 Ariel
18 Crash
19 Home is Foreign (The Final Ascent)
20 Fin.
Singles and Further:
At the end of two years or pretty much constant work I had recorded a massive amount of music.
A lot of ideas were scrapped, but, in total, about 6 or 7 hours of music was completed. I had written songs specifically to go in certain places in the narrative, so when the time came to compile the album, I was picking from batches of songs that were meant to go in specific places on one of the two discs. The final album was about 2 hours and 40 minutes. Then there were three singles, each with a lot of b-sides; and finally there was an alternate, single-disc version of the album called Further, which told the same narrative, but in a compressed form, with totally different songs.
I’ve not uploaded MP3s of the b-sides and Further, because it would just be a massive amount of music. But if anyone is interested you can contact us through our facebook page and we can send them to you.
Single 1: Cold Fate
Cold Fate was meant to be a sort of transitional track. It begins with an industrial-rock sort of vibe in the verse and choruses, but then moves into a more abstract solo section and outro. I wanted it to start somewhere familiar and end by opening up into a bigger landscape. The b-sides on the single were meant to lead the listener further and further away from the familiar.
01 Cold Fate02 Falling Down03 Nowhere You04 Dethroned05 Hate Beyond Hope06 Solace
Single 2: The Way/10 Seconds
The second single was a double a-side and loaded with b-sides. The a-sides are heavy and noisy and the b-sides match. It opened with a shorter radio-edit of The Way for college radio (which was the only place we got airplay, though, to be fair, we never sent cds to any other stations).
01 The Way (Radio Edit)02 10 Seconds03 Motion04 Slight05 Infinite Disasters06 Pressure07 Crucible08 Dismembered09 Excess10 While (Ver. 2)11 Relentless Punishment12 Crawl13 The Way (Album Version)14 Loop15 Once16 Boil17 Asshole
Single 3: Surrender
The Surrender single featured more atmospheric and pretty songs. It was also loaded down with b-sides.
01 Surrender02 Twitch03 Mirror04 Mines05 All I see06 Rise07 Flinch08 Dawn09 Dusk10 Clouds11 Survive12 Harm13 Systems Collapse14 If15 Being Watched16 Slow Waves Rising17 Surrender (Demo)
Further
Further was an afterthought. Even with both discs of the album and three singles worth of b-sides there was still some completed music that I liked that I hadn’t done anything with. So I came up with the idea to create an alternate version of the album on a single disc. It tells the same narrative as the original 2-disc album, but in a more compressed manner, and with songs that have a pretty different sound to the ones that I selected for the album. I wanted to try to make selections that felt like they used the same archetypes, but in a very different myth.
01 Inception02 Fall03 Transgression04 Alles ist Nacht05 The Golden Age Before the Inevitable Decline06 Crumble07 Unsure08 Further09 Revenio10 Nox adest11 Necessary12 Cauldron13 Deus Mortalis14 Myth15 Reaffirming the Sense of Discontent16 Melancholy17 Pale Grey18 Machine19 Hung on the World Tree20 Avalon21 Squall
