8. Dälek
Dälek played in Boston when I was living there and I didn’t see them, but Aaron Harris [Isis drummer] came to practice and was like, ‘Oh you guys gotta hear Dälek, their show was amazing’. I don’t remember how it happened exactly, but we ended up on a bill with them and The Dillinger Escape Plan in Philadelphia around 2001 and their whole set was absolutely riveting. I was so ecstatic listening to them and watching them perform. That was the beginning of our friendship with them, we hit it off right away. At that time one of the things that we had in common was Justin Broadrick, ’cause Dälek had toured with Techno Animal and we had done some stuff with Justin. This led to the first of a few tours that Dälek did with Isis. I think we toured with them 3 possibly 4 times between the States and Europe.
They were pushing the boundaries of their genre in the same way as Isis. Taking these things that were interesting and powerful about those genres but also injecting all this other stuff into it. In their case, elements of noise and shoegaze, all these things that, when filtered properly, made perfect sense to each other and achieved this perfect state of musical symbiosis without in any way sounding like it was slapped together. There was no sense of genre-hopping. It was this very cohesive thing. We were both misfits in our respective worlds. Theoretically we were a metal band but on the occasions that we opened for much bigger metal bands, we didn’t go over well and similarly, when they opened for big hip hop acts, the audience just didn’t get it. So, we had to make our own worlds.
