NE OBLIVISCARIS: Great Things Come to Those Who Wait

INTERVIEW WITH TIM CHARLES BY LIZ RAMANAND

Australian progressive metal act Ne Obliviscaris has unleashed their latest album Exul, which took years to make thanks to the pandemic and was a long process but worth the wait.

“It was incredibly difficult (laughs), yet incredibly rewarding with how the final product turned out. I think a lot of bands have their pandemic related recording story these days,” says Tim Charles, the band’s violinist and clean vocalist, about the recording process of Exul. The last week of March, we were going to enter the studio, and we were flying Mark Lewis, our producer, out from Nashville to come to Melbourne, Australia. We were going to spend six weeks recording the album.”


“INSTEAD OF ALL RECORDING IT TOGETHER IN A SIX-WEEK PERIOD IN MELBOURNE, IT TOOK US TWO-AND-A-HALF YEARS, ACROSS NINE DIFFERENT RECORDING STUDIOS”


Charles goes on to speak about Australian lockdowns and how it disrupted not only the making of the record, but he also didn’t see his fellow bandmates who lived in Europe for years.

“The Australian government closed borders to Italians first, and literally that got announced just before Tino was about to drive to the airport on the day that he was supposed to fly to Australia. He couldn’t come at the very last second. Benji was supposed to come a few days later, Mark Lewis a few days after that, and none of them made it,” says Charles. “I actually didn’t see those guys in person for four whole years because borders here in Australia were closed for so long. Instead of all recording it together in a six-week period in Melbourne, it took us two-and-a-half years, across nine different recording studios and spaces in what was a completely different scenario to what we had planned.”

When the band did finally see each other, they got together to make a record they are truly proud of. Post-pandemic, seeing his bandmates and playing shows were a breath of fresh air for Charles.

“The reuniting, it was such a beautiful thing. We turned up for three days of rehearsal in Helsinki before our European tour in May, and that was the first tour of this album cycle. It was great to be in the same room and just to play music together,” Charles says about reconnecting post pandemic. “My favorite thing about being in this band is playing shows, and it was a weird thing to not be able to do that for such a long period of time. It has been since 2015 that we’ve been on the road three to six months every year. Then all of a sudden I was home for almost four years in a row.”

Charles goes on to say that while lockdowns were hard, it allowed him to spend more time with his daughter since he wasn’t on the road touring.

“The flip side of that was, it did really give an opportunity to slow down a bit. I have a beautiful daughter who’s 11 years old now, and from when she was about two to when she was seven and a half, I was away a lot,” says Charles. “Then from the ages of seven to 11, I was home the whole time. That was really great for us, to be able to be a bigger part of her day-to-day life.”


“WHEN WE HOPPED BACK UP ON STAGE IN MAY IN EUROPE, THE CROWD AND EVERYTHING WAS SO AMAZING. IT MADE EVERYTHING FEEL RIGHT AGAIN.”


The pandemic also proved difficult for Charles as he was going through more personal losses, but when he was finally able to get out of the fog, he began to connect with his creative side again.

“I was really burnt out when the pandemic hit, so from that perspective, the break was welcome. But when it arrived, I went through a divorce and my mom died, then there’s lockdowns on and off. Melbourne, Australia was one of the most lockdown cities in the entire world,” Charles says. “It was great to be able to get back into that headspace eventually and reconnect to that creative side of myself, because when we hopped back up on stage in May in Europe, the crowd and everything was so amazing. It made everything feel right again.”

According to Charles, some of the lyrics were written a few months before the pandemic and other lyrics were written six to 12 months after the pandemic hit. Certain songs were incredibly personal to him and the record shows qualities of each person at the time of making it.

“Every record is always a reflection of where we’re at as people at that time. Each album has this consistency of sound because it’s mostly the same group of guys. And yet at the same time, we grow and change as people and as creative artists, there are these differences as well,” Charles says. 

“A song like ‘Misericorde II – Anatomy of Quiescence,’ Benji and Martino wrote a lot of ‘Part I.’ I had these ideas to keep it going often in a different direction,” Charles goes on to say about this specific track. “Most of that song I wrote at a time when I found out my mom had terminal cancer, and it was out of nowhere. At that initial time, I was thinking that maybe it might be any time, like any week now, which was really this shock. Gratefully, my mom was able to hang around another almost two years.”

Charles has been playing the violin since he was six years old, and in high school, he knew he wanted to be a violinist full time. But when he heard the combinations of strings in metal from bands like Apocalyptica and Opeth, he knew that’s what he wanted to combine and create.

“I started discovering acts like Apocalyptica and seeing some other examples of string plays in metal. I thought that was pretty amazing,” says Charles about this niche combination. “That was how Xen and I got in contact where we just ran into each other on an online metal forum.”

“He sent me a message saying, ‘Hey, do you want to come along and have a jam?’ He was starting a new band, and it went from there. I remember listening to the radio probably about, maybe 2001 or something like that, there was a metal program here in Australia called The Racket. I remember they played a bunch of songs from Blackwater Park and they were interviewing Mikael Åkerfeldt. I had never heard something that was so beautiful and still death metal.”


“ONE OF THE GREATEST THINGS ABOUT METAL AS A GENRE FOR A CREATIVE ARTIST IS THAT YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT”


He gravitated towards metal because it allowed for limitless creative freedom for him as an artist and violinist.

“One of the greatest things about metal as a genre for a creative artist is that you can do whatever you want (laughs). You can combine whatever you want, and I’ve never thought Ne Obliviscaris sounds like any of those bands, per se,” says Charles. “I was definitely very inspired by that idea of just being yourself and writing whatever you wanted with combining whatever genres you wanted and whatever my mind could come up with.”

Charles goes on to talk about why he thinks his home country of Australia has one of the best scenes for heavy music. He cites everyone from major heavy hitters like Parkway Drive, Thy Art Is Murder, and Amity Affliction to smaller acts like Karnivool, Twelve Foot Ninja, and more.

“These bands started to break out internationally, and promoters and fans realized the quality of some Australian acts. On the more metalcore side, Parkway Drive was touring overseas a lot on a much smaller level back in the day, but there really weren’t a lot of bands that toured regularly overseas,” says Charles about the Aussie metal scene. 

“Whereas now, different bands and all of them are bands that can headline around the world and are doing great things. I’m not really sure what it is about the scene over here. I think it’s part of the fact that we’re on the other side of the world. Sometimes it encourages Australian artists to do their own thing because we’re not part of a big scene, so I do feel like Australia often creates interesting bands.”