Name: The Gathering
Members: Frank Boeijen, Hans Rutten, Hugo Prinsen Geerligs,  René Rutten, Silje Wergeland
Interviewee: Hans Rutten
Nationality: Norwegian (Silje), Dutch (everyone else)
Recent release: The Gathering's Beautiful Distortion is out via Psychonaut.

If you enjoyed these thoughts by The Gathering and would like to find out more about the band, visit their official homepage. They are also on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter.

This interview with the group was originally conducted for beat magazine by Sascha Blach aka Mansions in the Sea.



Has Covid changed your approach to songwriting?

We've recorded demos on the computer before and sent files back and forth or recorded rehearsals. But at some point you just need the feeling of a band again, and you only get that when you're together in the rehearsal room or in the studio.

Thank God we had the possibility to have Silje with us in the studio over the distance. She wasn't there in person, but she was connected from home and could hear what was going on. You just have to be creative and that's what we tried to do, making the best of the not so ideal circumstances.

It's definitely a headphone album that you need to listen to more often.

Yes, that is also the tenor of the first reviews, that the album needs time to grow. But that also applies to How To Measure A Planet?, for which we got a lot of negative feedback at the time. And now, for many people, it's the best album we've done.



I think this longplayer is similar, we worked a lot on details. Also, the album is recorded in Dolby Atmos, even though we're only releasing the stereo version for now. That means we recorded a lot more sounds than you hear in the regular stereo version. Eventually we will release the Dolby Atmos version as well, but of course we realize that not everyone will have the opportunity to listen to it that way.

There are special headphones for it, and Spotify and Facebook are working on systems for it right now. On Tidal, you can already hear albums in Dolby. So we hope that soon it won't be so difficult to hear the album the way it was meant to be heard.

But for now, we're focusing on the stereo version, because I think there's a lot happening in it as well. The music has many layers and is very detailed. This is also due to Attie Bauw, who produced the album – just like How To Measure A Planet? - and loves to tweak the details.

Compared to the first demos, has the album grown even more in the studio?

Yes, definitely. Some songs more than others. "Weightless" and "When We Fall" are good examples. We had ideas, but they only reached their full bloom in the studio.



Other songs are not so different from the first demo now, for example the more archetype The Gathering songs like "We Rise".



New ideas pop up in the studio all the time and we really recorded an incredible number of layers, but also threw a lot away again. But we always work in such a way that we first record a lot and then don't use everything.

What is the biggest difference between the stereo and Dolby mixes?

It’s mainly just more sounds, because you have to feed more speakers with signals. I would compare it to a movie theater experience, just without the movie.

With Dolby Atmos you are really into the music, similar to how you are more in the movies in the cinema than at home. We also had the idea of renting a small cinema with a Dolby Atmos system and showing it to a small audience, because very few people have 20 speakers hanging in their living room. And since the Dolby Atmos headphones are still in development, we would like to do something already.

We hope that Beautiful Distortion gets some time to develop on the listener side. It will be released on CD and vinyl first, and hopefully as Dolby Atmos at some point later. It's a new experience for us, too, because not many bands release albums in the Dolby Atmos format.

After we mixed the album in Dolby Atmos, we had to go back to stereo at some point, and that was like switching from 3D to 1D. We were just like, "damn" (laughs). You do have to be careful not to get addicted to the Dolby Atmos mix, because it's really overwhelming and a great experience.

How exactly did you go about mixing?

We first mixed each song in Dolby Atmos and then decided which sounds we wanted to use for the stereo image. It's difficult to go from many speakers to two speakers. Even worse is a mono album with only one signal. There it's even harder to find the right balance in one speaker.

Basically, the more speakers you have, the easier it becomes to mix, because you can distribute the sounds more easily. It's like placing the sounds in an environment.

The album, despite all the beauty in the details, actually contains a lot of distortion, even on the drums. Does the title Beautiful Distortion describe the music?

The lyrics are about the distortion we encounter in human interaction. Silje writes mainly about relationships. It's about challenges and miscommunications and different perceptions. But from this also comes a lot of beauty, which inspired the title.

Of course, there are also musical connections. For example, in the track "When We Fall," there's a lot of distortion, but it also contains a melotron, which always sounds very nice from my point of view.

We thought the title fitted musically and lyrically very well. It just clicked.

Were you also ble to record a lot in the home studio thanks to the technical advancements?

Yes, we recorded demos and some tracks from them made it into the final version, others did not. A lot of plug-ins today are so advanced that it often doesn't make a difference anymore. Even I, as a drummer, recorded some takes at home. Siljie recorded her vocals in Norway, but she was connected live to Attie in the process. He got the stream directly into his mixing console. So we used all kinds of technical tools.

Studios are still very expensive. So of course it makes sense to prepare as much as possible in advance. But there are instruments, like drums, that benefit a lot from a studio, whereas with keyboards it's not so important.  

Do you value the use of analog hardware?

Sometimes we use analog equipment, sometimes plug-ins and then again a real piano and a microphone. We also did a lot of reamping, so we recorded sounds and later sent them through other speakers again. Our guitarist René also built his own pedals and a guitar amp. That makes the album even more personal. There are some videos of it on our social media channels.

I think that this joy of experimentation is one of the strengths of the band.

But the joy of experimenting cost you quite a few fans, especially in the 90s, who didn't want to go along with your change of style.

Yes, that's true. We've been getting a lot more attention since then from the open-minded part of the prog scene, but also from tolerant metal listeners. There are still people following us from the Century Media heyday of the band and appreciating what we do, even if we don't go back to the gothic metal sound of the 90s. It's a similar evolution to Anathema or Ulver. I would see them as crossover bands as much as us - eclectic bands that aren't stuck in one genre.

But basically that was already the case with our album Mandylion. Sure, it sounds like a metal album on the surface, but there are already a lot of different influences on it. The album is heavily influenced by Dead Can Dance, but also by shoegaze. We just had to evolve and learn as musicians and as a band. In that sense, there was already a lot of How To Measure A Planet? in Mandylion.

[Read our Lisa Gerrard of Dead can Dance interview]



But also the recording technique has evolved. With Mandylion and Nighttime Birds it was normal to record on 24 tracks. Ten days of recording, mixing and that was it. For How To Measure A Planet? we were in the studio for three months, working with Pro-Tools for the first time. That opened the door to sound experiments and the motto "the sky is the limit" applied (laughs).

Now with Beautiful Distortion it was similar. We make music first and foremost for ourselves and try to produce an album that we would like to hear. Then we hope that the rest will like it too.