“I love those guys man, they’re some of my favourite people I’ve ever toured with,” Townsend says. “It’s easy, there’s no hierarchy, everyone’s intelligent and seems to have a good sense of humour. And when you’re away from home and you’re playing with other people, it’s important that you don’t have to actively avoid the one douche on the tour. So when there are other people you get along with it makes it so much more enjoyable to tour.”
Periphery’s Misha Mansoor has always been up front about his love of all things Dev, and the feeling seems to be mutual. “They’re an amazing group of musicians,” Townsend says. “Each one of them is a virtuoso in a number of ways. It’s a complementary package because there are certain aspects between us that are similar, but it’s different enough that it works. They’re a lot younger too, so there’s that aspect of their sound, but I think when people come to the show they’re going to enjoy the similarities and differences.”
Beyond the similarities in clean-to-scream vocals, there are some intriguing contrasts between the two bands. For instance, whereas Townsend tends to write more direct riffs, Periphery’s tend to be rather complicated and can take a few listens to get to the heart of the song. “When I do complicated music I usually make it for the express purpose of illustrating a complicated point, like Deconstruction or Alien or Infinity,” Townsend says. “But when it comes to my proclivities, what comes out of me naturally, I write three or four minute long songs. There’s an aesthetic, sonically, that I try to capture. And it gets refined from album to album. But musically I don’t tend to write complicated stuff unless it’s part of the theme.”
Townsend’s various proclivities have ingratiated him to Australian audiences over the years, making this the Canadian artist’s umpteenth trip to Oz. “I think the reason why there has been a relationship between myself musically and Australia for so long, is because culturally we come from something similar, but also there’s an aspect of what I do that I pride myself on and that’s an ability to subconsciously say, ‘Fuck it’ when it comes to what anybody expects from me. Like, if people want me to be younger than I am or heavier than I am, or more complicated or less complicated, all of those thoughts have never played into my creative process. I’ve never had to go the commercial route. I’ve never had to bend, really, when it comes to my musical objectives. If I feel like doing something commercial it’s because that’s what I feel like doing, rather than it being something that I try and hammer into people’s consciousness. And I think that sort of ‘Fuck it’ attitude is something I feel from the Australian audience in general.”
It does indeed seem that Australian crowds don’t put much pressure on Townsend to simply play the old stuff. “There are certain avenues that I’ve found myself going down over the years that even at the time I wasn’t particularly interested in even if I had a compulsion to do so, and so I’ve followed those things, and it always ends that my subconscious mind was trying to tell me something that my conscious mind had no idea of. I believe that the process of making music is permanently rooted in self-discovery. You just have to submit to it because I think if you don’t, that’s the point where you’re making a product rather than something with heart.”
BY PETER HODGSON
