How Chaos Divine found connection in the chaos

As one of the world’s finest progressive heavy acts, Perth’s Chaos Divine have secured their own legacy over the course of 17 years and four iconic releases that have built exponentially upon the one that came before it. 2008’s Avalon LP took the heaviness of 2006’s Ratio EP to lofty new places. Its follow-up LP The Human Connection (2011) was the perfect bridge between sheer heaviness and the increasingly more progressive sound that would define 2015’s Colliding Skies LP. In 2020, the band released their gargantuan fourth record Legacies LP, a visceral and emotional masterpiece capturing Chaos Divine at their absolute best. Twelve years on from the release of The Human Connection, an album that is arguably the band’s most iconic, Chaos Divine are rebirthing this nine-track epic in its entirety along with a hand-picked selection of other tracks for a very special live performance at Badlands Bar on Saturday, February 25 with special guests Yomi Ship and Amberdown. Long-time fan ANDY “ANDO” JONES spoke to Chaos Divine’s Tim Stelter (drums), Simon Mitchell (guitar), Dave Anderton (vocals), Michael Kruit (bass) and Ryan Felton (guitar), to find out the story behind The Human Connection, and how it feels to be performing it live all these years later. 

Tell us what The Human Connection means to you?

TIM: I commenced Chaos Divine drumming duties in 2017 after Ben Mazzarol left to pursue other interests. From the outside looking in, 2011’s The Human Connection is one of those albums that comes around only once in a while, in the same vein as Themata by Karnivool. When you hear an album this good from your hometown, it makes you think, “Damn! This is what’s possible now!” The album was a raising of the bar of what is possible for a local band. Everything about it was an elevation.

While Chaos Divine were doing The Human Connection, guitarist and engineer Simon Mitchell was also recording the EP for one of my previous bands, Weapons. I was lucky enough to hear a little bit of The Human Connection in its formative state. Then when it officially dropped, I was taken aback with the depth of the record. There’s layers upon layers, especially from frontman Dave Anderton.

Dave, can you please talk about your involvement in the song writing process of The Human Connection?

DAVE: It’s worthwhile going back before then. With 2006’s Ratio, half the songs were written for that EP at the time I joined the band, so I didn’t have a huge amount of involvement in the song writing except for the lyrics and most of the vocal melodies. I was more involved in 2008’s Avalon.

With The Human Connection I had a fair bit to do with the music writing process, a lot more than with Ratio and Avalon.

So The Human Connection means more to you than the releases before it?

My dad was a keen, keen diver ­– a marine archaeologist. He died at the beginning of 2010 in a diving accident, doing what he loved. 99% of the album lyrics are about Dad and growing up under his wing. The Human Connection is about the relationship I shared with Dad, and 2020’s Legacies feels like The Human Connection Part II because it contains a song or two about the relationship I have with my son, so it’s kind of come full circle again.

Now that I’m a dad myself, One Door hits so much harder.

DAVE: Yeah, One Door was one of the first songs on The Human Connection that I put down after my dad had passed, and Beautiful Abyss was the very last song. At the time, I said that I didn’t want to write any more songs about Dad, but they just kept flowing.

Was it part of the grieving process?

DAVE: Totally, even the lyrical inspiration for Silence. That song is about when something terrible happens to you, and people come out of the woodwork saying “let me know if I can do anything” – but when you do call on someone who has made that offer, there’s often silence. You know that the offer is just aesthetics.

A token response?

DAVE: Yeah, but Beautiful Abyss is the flip side. The lyrics are a positive spin on the situation.

And celebrating the legacy of your father?

DAVE: For sure. An interesting story – my dad was actually one of Tim’s teachers in High School at South Freo.

TIM: Yeah, having known the man, The Human Connection hits me on another level. I haven’t been too forthright about that level of the connection over the years. Eventually when I was asked to join the band, the connection to Mr Anderton was always in the back of my mind and it was another reason for me to be in this band, beyond just being a drummer. There’s a deeper level to it.

Perth sure is a small place… What I love about The Human Connection is it really was that steppingstone. You listen to Avalon and it’s got so much anger and it’s a mosh pit friendly kind of album, whereas The Human Connection is that next step up, it’s a maturation of the sound and much more progressive…

DAVE: Yeah, Simon and guitarist Ryan Felton deserve credit because they sacrificed their riffs. On the previous releases, it was about writing the coolest riff, then me being asked to sing over the top of it. But at some point of your song writing journey, if you want to make the best song, you’ve got to sacrifice riffs for melodies.

SIMON: Our writing process has gone through a few different methods over the years. We’ve tried different things, like an organic, in-the-band-room approach, where someone comes up with a riff or an idea and then it blossoms from there.

It’s been a while since The Human Connection was written. I think there was a fair bit of coming up with core ideas, whether it be myself, Ryan or previous drummer Ben Mazzarol (2005–2007, 2008–2017) or anyone really. Dave and bassist Mike Kruit both came to the table with their original ideas but for the most part, it was either Ryan or myself coming up with a basic idea and then some songs were fleshed out and then finished off.

Everybody would get together around the computer at someone’s house, then some of the other songs were finished off and completed in the jam room. So it was a bit of a mixed bag with The Human Connection.

So primarily you would say that the song writing process does start with guitars?

RYAN: Yeah, most albums we write always start with me and Simon coming up with riffs, it’s how we go about it now. With The Human Connection, I remember heading to Simon’s place most weeknights to flesh bits out, turn riffs into songs, going back over songs to come up with solo parts and all that stuff. Then we’d take the songs into the jam room on the weekend when we’d rehearse and make sure that the songs were structurally complete.

At the time we did a lot more preparation for The Human Connection than we probably do now. We all agreed that it was going to be a big block in the studio, recording, so we wanted to be prepared. The Human Connection probably had the most amount of finessing out of any of our albums. We went back over lots of parts and really tried to make it work as best we could.

You recorded the album at Underground Studios in Booragoon? Are there any Booragoon locals in the band?

DAVE: I am. My parents’ house is in Booragoon, I’d ride my bike to Underground Studios to put down some vocals, head back home, write some more vocals, go back to the studio again. I’d do my vocal warm-ups on the way. People riding around me were probably wondering “what the hell is this guy doing?”

Is there anything that really stands out to you like a memory of the recording, mixing and mastering process at all?

MIKE: When you listen back to something you’ve just done, Beautiful Abyss for example, that song was laid out to us by Simon a couple of weeks before heading into the studio – it was a late addition. Getting to the point where you’re hearing it back through the desk and monitors and you’re like “oh man, this song is pretty good!”

Had we recorded a month earlier, Beautiful Abyss wouldn’t be on The Human Connection. It was late to the piece, so it could have missed out, it could have been on Colliding Skies, who knows. Obviously One Door is pretty iconic on The Human Connection, but you couldn’t really see that record without Beautiful Abyss, it’s exactly where it belongs, where it sits in the track order.

Also, we were in a super-fertile window of song writing and if we didn’t book the recording slot when we did, we would have just kept writing and maybe even created enough songs for a double-record. We needed to put a stamp on that period of time, so it’s lucky there was a recording studio in the way. Otherwise we may have been faced with cutting songs and that would have been terrible.

DAVE: Unlike everything before and everything since, The Human Connection is the only album where we have recorded everything in a single studio.

MIKE: Yeah, for Avalon, we recorded drums over at Sing Sing in Sydney. Recording The Human Connection at Underground Studios was the first opportunity we had as the whole band to bunker down for a month straight and just knock it out. We had all the tracks ready to go and we got in there and made it happen. I think it was six days a week we were grinding it out. We got access to guitars, multiple drum kits ­– we had the works, different cabs, different heads and got to experiment.

Some of the songs weren’t quite fleshed out yet, there were bits that we wanted to rearrange. We had the opportunity with all the tools to get the best outcome and that was a brand-new experience. To this day, we’ve booked Underground Studios for every record. We use it as a home base to record drums at the absolute minimum.

What can you tell us about the guitar rigs that were used to track The Human Connection?

SIMON: We ran two different guitar tones and four layers. Bad Cat left and right, then we used an ENGL Fireball left and right as well, because tonally they work together. If you have four layers of guitars rather than two, it makes everything bigger, so we used those two different amps.

I can’t remember what guitars we used, because whenever we go into the studio, and especially when recording The Human Connection, the best prep is to get your hands on as much gear as possible. Given the money we were spending to hire out Underground Studios for a month, the foyer was loaded with guitars and amps that we’d borrowed from friends. I think we had a $100,000 worth of borrowed guitars and amps in the studio. So many PRSs and Les Pauls, every style of guitar and amp that you could think of.

What about the rigs that you’re using nowadays?

RYAN: We’ve switched to modelling, but we still do run live guitar amps on stage, so we get the best of both worlds. I’m running the Quad Cortex Neural DSP which is awesome. It does a whole bunch of really cool stuff. It’s got a whole lot of power and all the effects you could want in it, so it’s great!

I’ve captured all the amplifiers that we used back in the day of the recording. We had an unbelievably huge amp collection to choose from when recording The Human Connection thanks to our mates Troy Nababan and Leon Todd (a big YouTuber in the Fractal community). So I went over to Leon’s studio and borrowed his MESA Boogie Mark IV, and a bunch of other amps. I’ve got a Bogner at home so I was able to capture all those in the Neural DSP, which is an amazing new technology that basically gives you a snapshot of your amp that you can use in a multi-effects kind of setup. You can send it into your in-ear monitors, you can send it to front of house, but it sounds exactly like your traditional amplifier. So having all that at our disposal now is just amazing!

A result of having all this tech has meant that we’ve got a tighter live show now.

SIMON: I’m running an Axe-FX AX8. I actually bought it off Ryan when he switched over to his Neural DSP setup. It’s been really good, it’s changed the game for me actually, it’s made rehearsals a lot more fun being able to pump everything into your in-ears directly and being able to hear what you’re doing is totally different and it’s really cool, I really like it!

I want to focus on the human connections that built The Human Connection. Can you tell us about Jens Bogren’s involvement?

RYAN: At the time of writing the album, we were all really interested in bands like Arch Enemy, Soilwork, Katatonia, Opeth and the albums they were putting out. They all had this same sound and amazing production, a style that wasn’t being produced in Australia. We really wanted to explore producers in Europe with the aim of giving our sound a bit of an edge.

We contacted Jens online, we told him we were big fans of his work, then we gave him a bit of a listen to some of the tracks, and he gave us some good feedback. In my opinion, Opeth’s Ghost Reveries is one of the greatest albums of all time, which was mixed and mastered by Jens. For him to come back and say he was amazed and blown away with our material, we knew we were on to a good thing with the album.

I was over at Simon’s house when we got the first mixes back and I could not believe it was the same material we sent away, because it sounded like everything had come to life! The way he’d mixed it, everything sat perfectly. There was a bigness to the sound which we hadn’t had in any of our songs or recordings up until then.

The releases before The Human Connection were done on the cheap with home recording. The Human Connection still stands as the most expensive album we’ve made to date.

Ryan, as a very talented graphic designer, you are primarily responsible for the aesthetics of Chaos Divine. I think you’ve done an incredible job with the album artwork on The Human Connection. Can you tell us about the process?

RYAN: It was a long process because of the deep meaning for Dave in a lot of the songs. When songs carry such a personal meaning it’s not an easy process for someone else to step in and put a visual spin on the songs and represent the album visually.

We did a lot of different concepts. The idea of two faces was always in the back of my mind, and I wanted to explore that. There was a lot of different styles and things we were playing with, but one night I saw the silhouette shape that the two faces create in the middle of the design, and I thought it was cool to play with that negative space. Then I experimented with some of the colours and the style of the energy coming through the faces. For me it represented so much of what went into the album – the energy and the effort. It’s got an iconic look to it which stood the test of time. A lot of people like seeing The Human Connection artwork on merch and we always get requests for shirts and things like that.

I really enjoy doing the art for the band, it keeps me busy because there’s always a lot to do. We like to pride ourselves on our artwork as well, I think it somewhat makes us who we are. We’ve always had pretty good visuals for our artwork and I’ve really enjoyed filling that role in the band.

DAVE: I remember the design process for the album cover. I remember Ryan’s original concept was a butterfly merged into faces, which I loved; I thought it was awesome. Then he had this graphical aesthetic idea of patterns and then came up with the faces. Originally the people were face-to-face and in my mind the faces were my dad’s and mine. Then Ryan focused on the minds and the energy and the spirituality between the two faces.

What was it like holding the pressed copy of the album in your hands for the first time?

MIKE: That was awesome! To step things up from the $1.45 – $2.10 a unit with a gatefold case, we created a really nice physical product. Nothing beats having the end product in your hands. It’s all there, it’s all polished, you can’t beat it!

Super-stoked with the outcome – I can listen back to The Human Connection. Being in a band you write records and listen to the songs repetitively. Sometimes you might only want to listen to a select few songs. With The Human Connection, I can listen to that record start to finish, on the regular, and still be happy; I love the record. Having a product like that, you’re proud of it at the end of the day, absolutely.

Pride really is a big thing – I’m proud to have been a part of and proud to have written the album. We love playing the songs, and with the upcoming show, we’ve never played the album in its entirety, in order as well.

Are you looking forward to performing The Human Connection in its entirety at Badlands?

TIM: Absolutely, we’ve been working on this for quite a few months now. My aim essentially is to pay homage with the deepest of respect to Ben and the band’s original vision of The Human Connection. But, you know, your own blood seeps into a performance so there’s going to be some moments that are me, through and through. The guys didn’t want to cram me into a shoebox and say I had to play exactly a certain way – it’s my own will to make sure that it’s done properly.

I am very much a fan and a believer in that music is a conversation, it’s a living thing, it’s not just a static record. If you want that, listen to the CD. If you want to see it done live, then you’re listening to a real-time conversation between the five of us playing. I’ll cop a vibe and it’ll make me hit that little bit harder. Me hitting a little bit harder will mean Simon picks up on it and has something that he can add. It’s the same with all of us. It’s the feedback loop that I think every musician chases. Everyone’s there for that feedback.

Furthermore, when the five of us and the crowd are on the same page, then the whole thing just amplifies and amplifies and amplifies and that’s the shit that sustains you. When things aren’t going so well in your life or at work or whatever, that’s the thing that keeps you ticking over. It’s the get out of jail free card. If it’s been a while since you’ve played a show you feel like you’re in a bit of a funk, then you play that show and you’re like, “Fuck, this is obviously a part of what I’m meant to do to make my life whole”.

Again, we have been working hard to get the set where it needs to be. We’re 100% there at this stage and it’s feeling really good. Full production – everything that we need to make this Chaos Divine show the best of its kind.

A couple of little sneaky things may be hidden in there that I don’t want to give away just yet, but certainly worth a visit if anyone’s on the fence at the moment. Come down, have a beer with us, have a chat and let us know what The Human Connection means to you. Just enjoy the show.

Chaos Divine play Badlands Bar on Saturday, February 25, 2023. For more info and to buy tickets head to badlandsbar.oztix.com.au