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Travelers

Today, we bring you a special insight to Mark’s life and perspective after releasing Liminal Rite, soon to be a dad, and operating Kardavox Academy.

Our resident journalist, JP, sat down to chat with Mark recently and took the time to transcribe the discussion for you, our Enlisted Travelers. 🙂

Enjoy!

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INTERVIEW WITH MARK

Hey Mark! Long time no talk, I am hoping all is well and that life isn’t too hectic in preparation for baby Garrett, the newest member of Kardavox Academy and Kardashev! Has the ‘reality’ (for lack of a better word) set in yet for how your world is going to drastically change, for the better of course?

Getting ready for the new little baby carrot, new little baby Kardavox. Pretty excited! Yeah, actually I am not nervous, not antsy whatsoever. The idea of my life changing doesn’t bother me at all. Like I know in these first couple months and even longer, I’ll have a lot less time for games and hanging out, stuff like that, but I really don’t mind as I am in this place where I feel ready for that next chapter. I want this next step to come!
There is this narrative that you often hear about that when you have a kid, your life ‘ends’. Every parent I know and have talked to were able to carve out time for themselves, although it is just considerably less, especially at first. So maybe I won’t play Magic the Gathering with Nico and Tyler as much in person as I did, but I still will play sometimes and if not in person, then it will be online over the computer. All in all, I am not too worried about it, I think it’ll be a great change of pace and source of inspiration moving forward.

Rumor has it (well not really a rumor as I heard about it from Nico himself ha) that he has now slowly made his way onto the team that is handling Kardavox Academy. With the channel growing and growing, clearly there needs to be more of a team supporting you and your many efforts to maintain the channel. Where in this support system/team does Nico fall? Reflecting back on the channel from its inception, did you ever imagine it to get to the level that it is now? Looking forward, what are you looking to expand upon?

Yes, so Nico is officially a paid part of the Kardavox Academy team now as you hinted at. He started off first just handling our Patreon, making sure things are happening on time and as they need to as we have a lot of Patrons now. It is really important for me that they get what they are paying for with how generous they are to support us. Being a team of 3, well if I include operations that also includes our video editor, so now we’re technically a team of 4 now. As far as the running of the business, a team of 2 was hard to meet those expectations that we had set on Patreon as we grew, so we decided to get some extra help and Nico having a lot of experience with ETP and things of that managerial manner, he was the obvious choice. He recently has grown into being sort of like our website project manager. Our buddy Riley is the webmaster, or web developer you could say, but Nico is the guy that will be coming up with a lot of ideas, helping us put those ideas to action, communicating with Riley and making sure things are working smoothly. If the website is not acting proper, Nico will be the guy who handles that and lets us know of those issues.
To be honest, did I expect the channel to get to where it is now? No, but I also don’t think forward a lot, you know what I mean? When it comes to the business, I really just think about being relevant and being helpful to people today. I guess I am not surprised to see the channel where it is currently at as we’ve put in a lot of good work and try our best to make it a channel worth watching!
Looking forward, there are a couple things I definitely want to expand upon on the channel. Eventually we want to get instructors for different instruments and get them on the channel. The first thing we’d do is pull in a guitar teacher; I got a couple people in mind who I think we could probably give a better situation than what they’re currently in financially. As a company, we aren’t rolling in crazy dough… Small is the key in small business. But I think if we brought somebody on and they were helping pull in extra money, it would be easy for us to contractually pay them. The difficulty with bringing people on board is if I am asking somebody to work for us full time, or even part time, I want to pay them a competitive, livable wage. If they’re doing just small projects like Nico is doing for example, but then it is a little different as he is technically working as an independent contractor. But if I was to pull someone on as an employee in which this is their main job and spend at least 30 hours a week, I wouldn’t feel right paying them less than a livable wage. I am very much an advocate for that, but since that isn’t something we can currently do, that is a little ways off. I don’t feel comfortable bringing more people on if I cannot pay them what they deserve to be paid. Anyways, expanding the team in that regard is something I’d really like to do, it’ll just take some time and continuous growth to get there.
Also, an E-course is also on the horizon, but I really want to make sure that the course is as valuable as possible rather than have it be dense and useless. It will be something a little smaller, a little more focused and you’ll hear more about that in the future!

Next, rumor has it (again Nico’s doing) that as you get further and further into creating the Alunean ‘dictionary’, there is a possibility that this next album will feature an Alunean rendition, similar to what Opeth did on their latest record with the Swedish version of ‘In Cauda Venenum’ for example. How has that process been like as you slowly get closer and closer to taming this beast? What challenges do you see in writing side-by-side in English and this fictional language? Another way to ask that same question in a roundabout manner is will the music drive how you craft the putting the language together from “the start”? (i.e will you craft the Alunean language and the words within it in such a way that it will fit the music based on the primary ‘English counterpart’ or will it be purely organic and separate from how it sounds in English?)

Yeah definitely, there are a few ongoing things or projects going on in that sphere right now. One is Chapter of Atlas and the other is Alunea as you had mentioned. In regards to further developing Alunea as a language and making that a core component of the next record, I put both of those on ‘hold’ after talking with Nico and expressing that I wanted to develop them more alongside the upcoming album so that they had good synergy with said album rather than try to cram in an album in this incomplete universe if that makes sense. But that does mean that it will be a little longer of a process, even if it has been really long, but at the same time it will mean that rather than us having to write the album around Alunea and Chapter of Atlas, I can adapt Alunea/Atlas to the tone of the album. That is really how we’ve always done things, as Nico writes the songs and I come in later and the tone of the song really dictates what I am writing about.
The whole reason “Between Sea and Sky” is about being on a boat is because the music to me sounds like water (refer to the intro/outro clean guitar arpeggios). It sounds like waves, currents, and water in general and that is what popped up in my head upon hearing the song for the first time. Then I wrote my parts with that vision in mind. We are going to be doing something like that but again, it’ll be a little on hold with the Alunean universe. We are currently digging into the next album so but how we navigate that is something that we’re actively thinking about of course.
I do think that it would be very fun to create an Alunean version of an album at some point, I don’t think that will happen on this upcoming one though. The challenges with that are going to be extensive to say the least. Part of the thing with Alunea is the length of the vowel dictates the meaning of the word. For example in English, if I was listening to a song and the lyrics were like “I ate steak” but in the song, the best way for me to sing it was “I ate steaaaaAAAAkkkkk” versus simply singing it as “I ate steak”, they still mean the same thing in the end. But if I did the same thing in Alunean for example for a given word, that extension/sustaining of the vowel changes the meaning of the word and/or sentence completely… Since music is so time based, it would be a very delicate process to think about if I am going to hold this word in English, it must be a plural word just to leave a rough example. I really have to keep all that in mind, as I’d have to think in two languages when writing lyrics and that would be tough. I do think it’s possible and if so, it’d be really good to hear how it turns out.

Finally, now that we’re three months post-release of Liminal Rite, what are your thoughts on the overall reception? Is there anything you wish the band/Metal Blade would’ve done different in terms of marketing, promotion, etc in lead up to the record?

It’s fucking crazy that it’s been three months. Overall I am VERY happy with the reception. I think that the reception is about as good as, if not better, than I expected. Probably better to be honest. I think the main thing really that was impressive to me was how much people really, really loved the album. We got a lot less criticism than I thought we were going to and that meant a lot to us. It especially meant a lot to me, as so many people had so many kind things to say. I’ll be honest to say that I did get a little overwhelmed for a while, so I had to stop following Liminal Rite for a bit. Everyone is saying all these wonderful things about me as a vocalist, and while that is very humbling and I am very appreciative for it all, when you get a lot of that at once, it can feel like a lot of pressure. Nobody was intending to do that of course, no one was intending to make me feel stressed, but it happened anyways. I took about a month where I didn’t listen to Liminal Rite, I didn’t look at any Liminal Rite-related stuff on the internet and I am slowly getting back into the spot where I can do that.
In the end, I am not complaining about it at all, it is just the first time that I was in such a public arena and it was very overwhelming, although in a good way. As far as doing things different on the album in hindsight, I can confidently say not at all. I know there are people are critical of the mix and that moving forward we will probably do something a little bit different. But as far as my own personal preference, I really like the mix, I really do stand by it and still do to this day. I think that a lot of reason that people don’t love it sometimes is because it is not a mix that would be generally heard paired with death metal and deathcore sounds. You’d hear it more in shoegaze or in post-metal, or even post-rock, and I think that that combination was a little jarring for some people. But we will explore some new things and we’ll see if we like it as much as we currently do and then go from there.
As regarding the hurdle of touring and if we’d ever see that ourselves… Man, that is just gonna be tough. None of us (other than Alex) are in that place in our lives for that right now, with families and new kids, running our own businesses, you name it. When you run your own business, there is no such thing as paid time off. If you’re not working, you’re not making money. With that being said, I am not particularly money driven, but I am rather driven by the feeling of security. If I lose a little bit of money here and there but at the end of the day I can still sleep without worrying about my bills, then that is totally fine for me. Being gone for a week or a month, touring or not, that is a HEAVY financial hit and you have to think about those things, you can’t fuck around with that as we have people that depend on the income from our businesses.

I am aware there is an additional barrier you guys face with the fact that Kardashev is a non-touring band as touring really helps get the word out there…
As you just talked about, the lack of touring means that you’ll have to find other avenues to share your music to potential listeners. With the release of Sleep Token’s debut record a few years ago, every other week in lead up to the album release they released a song as a single. They did this over a couple months for all the songs in the order as they would appear on the tracklist. So, each song on the album got all the attention as a ‘traditional single’ would on a typical album release and they all rotated through all the big Spotify playlists and so on… Those curated Spotify playlists are huge for getting new listeners to listen to your music as it clearly worked for Sleep Token. You can also look at Spiritbox as well as they capitalized on this by basically only releasing singles and bundling them as EPs later on. Then by the time they dropped their debut record, they already had such a large following that pushed it even further than it would’ve gone had they dropped that album from the very beginning.

For Kardashev, I think this would be a useful method to gather more attention and playlist spins as a means to reach more listeners. I know that releasing every song as a ‘single’ is far from ideal and takes away from the full album experience depending on who you ask. At the end of the rollout, the album would still be there to enjoy in full anyways. What are your thoughts on that marketing strategy?
That Sleep Token single release strategy is interesting, it’s a maybe… I think Metal Blade knows a lot about marketing and I will follow their lead there, but if it works very well for Sleep Token I think it could work well for us. My thoughts on marketing are this, if it is effective, I fully support it and if it is not effective, then I do not. I don’t really get hung up on what I think things should be, what is traditional versus what is too out of the norm etc. My end goal is to share our music with as many people as we can because I think most people really enjoy it when they hear it. If there is a way to do that better, I am willing to go ahead with that, it doesn’t matter to me what it is.

Sonic Updates

This week we get some insights into what Sean has been working on! He’s demoed some new drums for songs 2 and 3! Check it out and let us know what you think!