By David E. Gehlke
The role of the bass player in metal has long been subject to debate. Its value is evident in the triumvirate of Geezer Butler (BLACK SABBATH),Steve Harris (IRON MAIDEN) and Cliff Burton (METALLICA),then often followed by stories of the instrument being outright buried on a production (METALLICA‘s “…And Justice For All”) or turned down (DEATH‘s “Human”). Whatever the case, the bass in metal has long had to claw for respect. While it will likely never be viewed on an equal level as its surrounding instruments, there’s little denying a crop of players within death metal who have taken the bass to unforeseen levels — like Steve DiGiorgio and Jeroen Paul Thesseling.
Without going into resume overkill, DiGiorgio has held down the bass spot for SADUS, DEATH and now TESTAMENT (among others). Thesseling has manned the position for PESTILENCE and OBSCURA (among others). The commonality is that they both play a fretless bass, thus bringing them together in the one-of-a-kind project QUADVIUM. Instead of an all-out bass duel, QUADVIUM‘s ‘Tetradōm’ debut is a textured, progressive and, at times, ethereal listen, with DiGiorgio and Thesseling working around one another to create a soundscape unlike any other circa 2025. The pair were joined by American guitar virtuoso/composer Eve and drummer Yuma van Eekelen and as the bassists explained to BLABBERMOUTH.NET, getting QUADVIUM off the ground took some serious effort and ingenuity.
Blabbermouth: Is there a fraternity among fretless bass players? There’s only so many of your type around.
Steve: “Yes. Definitely. In the old school, Sean Malone [CYNIC] was known for it, but he accidentally snuck into metal. I hate when people make this ‘Greatest Metal Bass Players’ list and put Malone on it. He’s better than any metal bass player. [Laughs] It was pretty rare in the old days. Jeroen and I were at the genesis of bringing this instrument into this style of music. You could pick both of our brains for our influences. In that case, playing the fretless wasn’t unique at all. We looked up to those who influenced us, and that was normal for us. In the old days, there was nobody. Because we were both lucky enough to create an influential path, young players looked up to that and picked it up. Now, we’ve identified with them. We’ve met them, and they told us we were their influences and that they grew up with our music. The fact that they come to us and openly say, ‘You’re the reason I switched to fretless. You’re the reason I play.’ We’ve created a natural bond of fraternity with these younger players. Being a bass player in general is like being a shark. You have to swim against the current to breathe.”
Jeroen: “I think I only see Sean Malone, even though they don’t consider him a metal bass player. He played metal and did it in a great way, but I never perceived him as having a ‘metal’ sound. He had this super-recognizable sound character from his bass, fretless playing, and knowledge. He was teaching. He was very, very smart. He knew exactly what he was doing. At that time, I remember it was really special to have a band with a different-sounding bass player. I think that kicked off with CYNIC. It had a totally non-metal bass-sounding approach. That’s where Steve and I differ a little bit. Steve‘s style was more aggressive — still fretless. He was fretless first before I went one hundred percent fretless.”
Steve: “That’s Jereon‘s way of saying I’m much older than him. [Laughs]”
Blabbermouth: I’m sure there’s some shared history between all of the bands you’ve played with and the tours you’ve done. How did you hit it off?
Jeroen: “We never toured together. We visited each other when we were on tour. I think it was 2006 or earlier when we met, and we were hanging out behind the stage, sharing some ideas and having a conversation. Steve, that’s a long time ago.”
Steve: “That was in Arnhem when SADUS played a weird festival. That’s possibly the first time we met. I know I wasn’t very active in the late ’90s, the early 2000s sound about right. Then, we started running into each other on a more frequent basis. When we hung out in Holland at that time, we realized that, besides the ‘shop talk’ and all the nerd talk of bass playing, aside from the instrument we chose, we were similar and hit it off as normal friends. It was fun to hang out anyway. I considered myself in elite company and this guy turns out to be a goofball like me. I think one time in San Francisco when he was on tour with OBSCURA, he goes, ‘The band has a week and a half long run in Japan. I can’t go. I want you to be the guy who replaces me. I want you to fill in.’ At first I was like, ‘All right. I don’t know if it’s cool with the rest of the band, but the bass player asked me. I’ll give it a try.’ That’s when I realized how difficult their music was. I was so scared that a bootleg would come out with me butchering the songs. My wish came true so bad that there’s no footage, photos, anything. There’s no proof of me playing with OBSCURA. It’s for the better. It was a good thing. That motion right there, of him trusting me, to take care of his bass when he couldn’t tour was cool. That made us start the serious dialog about making some music together. I don’t want to compare it to when someone asks you to go to lunch, but it was like, ‘Two bass players? Are you serious? What the fuck is going to happen?’ Every time we’d cross paths and hang out, we’d talk about it. It seemed like, ‘We better do this thing. It hasn’t evaporated yet. The idea is going to nag us until we give it a try.’ We probably started around 2017 or 2018 because by 2019, we were on our first or second guitar player.”
Jeroen: “I think we started talking about it when you were touring with OBITUARY. That was in 2010 when you played in Holland. It has been a journey.”
Blabbermouth: What were the ground rules for the two of you in QUADVIUM? The first thing anyone will go to is that this could be two bass players trying to show off, but it’s not like that at all.
Steve: “The first thing we knew, and it almost came out of us naturally, was that we both knew that it wasn’t going to be a ‘lead bass’ or ‘rhythm bass’ or this mess of dueling solos. We knew we didn’t want it to be that. We wanted it to be a complex, synthetic melding of these instruments somehow. How we were going to do it, we had no idea.”
Jeroen: “Genre-wise, we both talked so often, apart from this project, about the music that inspires us. Steve came up with World Music. I sent him some flamenco rhythms. We started to exchange rough ideas in different styles, like a pattern of [Allan] Holdsworth-sounding scales or beautiful chords that we could work with. There were rough ideas, but they needed to be developed at a later stage.”
Steve: “Our guitar player, Eve, is like this other-worldly being with her level of music comprehension. The point is, in this description of the guitar playing, not only was he describing where he wanted to go musically, but the guitar player asked him to send pictures of some architecture that he felt represented the sound of the music. So, not only did this exist, but Mr. Thesseling, years ago, and he’s so surprised that I saved it, wrote this little code. It looked like Morse code dashes and dots. He put two lines, one on top of the other, and sometimes the marks mirrored each other, so they corresponded. Sometimes they were counter. This kind of hieroglyphic line is what he imagined how the basses would react going between unison playing and then counterpoint, call-and-answer and this thing of sharing a bass line between two basses. That’s when we knew we had this tangible thing where we were like, ‘This is what we were looking for.’ It took this weird sketch. It’s like the old story: ‘We went out to dinner and sketched a logo on a napkin.’ We knew we didn’t want to do a main bass and a backup bass or trade off every four bars. We had all this stuff we knew that we didn’t want. We didn’t have the thing we wanted, so when he drew that out, we went, ‘There it is.’ We still weren’t hearing it, but we could see it. We said, ‘Now we know. We need to create this background canvas for this little design to happen.'”
Blabbermouth: And this is how you had gotten into working with Eve, who was able to corral everything?
Jeroen: “Before we got in touch with Eve, we collaborated with Yuma. I played with him in PESTILENCE back in the day. We stayed friends and kept in touch, sharing the same musical tastes. I listened to flamenco, crazy jazz, or fusion with him while on tour. He popped into my mind immediately, like, ‘Wow, if we need a drummer, I’m going to ask him.’ We were lucky that he was interested. It took us some time to contact Eve, as we worked with a few other guitar players first.”
Steve: “Yuma was more like the anchor. He was taking our bizarre ideas and slowly pulling them out of the clouds and making anchor points. We had a shared folder with tiny song ideas, and we tried to hook them together. After all this work, we realized that even though we had three guys, the one thing we shared was that we’re all support players. We didn’t have a main composer among us, and we knew we had to set out to find one. We found a guitar player in France who we worked with for a while, but it didn’t turn out how we wanted. We then found an Armenian guitar player who lives in L.A. We thought his ethnicity would help us reach out and get in touch with oriental scales and stuff that’s outside of the box that normally comes to us. We don’t blame these guys for not working out because our idea was very bizarre and off to the side. It wasn’t working. Then Jeroen found Eve, who was cranking out these videos constantly. When he sent me the link, ‘What do you think about this?’ I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ I said, ‘She’s so much better than us.’ It turned out she was an unstoppable fountain of compositions. She would listen to these fundamental, primitive song ideas of ours, basically taking one crayon and creating a 42-color oil canvas painting. She would take this tiny little idea and write a huge song. She would make her guitar lines that were sometimes supportive and sometimes even floating on top of the dual bass conversation. A lot of the credit goes to Eve for what you hear.”
Jeroen: “She’s extremely talented.”
Blabbermouth: Directionally, you have djent, sludge and more ethereal stuff. How did you compartmentalize all of this with Eve?
Jeroen: “Songwriting wise, Eve would usually come up with a complete song and Steve would say, ‘Why don’t you double this?’ We don’t need 40 riffs a song. It was like a puzzle with Eve. We figured out how flexible she is. After that process, we needed to re-arrange the bass lines in a way that they wouldn’t interfere with each other in terms of frequency and composition. We had to go through another stage of orchestration and write the counterpoint for both bass lines, the classical elements. Before we could even begin tracking, there were all these different stages. Steve came here to track his bass, but the next stage was super demanding for Eve. We needed to position those completely different-sounding basses in the production and the mix. That’s another discussion.”
Steve: “Those Zoom calls he’s talking about, did we let Eve run away with the songs? No. Every single demo she showed the three of us — me, JP and Yuma — we were fucking blown away. It seemed like 99 percent of the changes we would ever suggest would be about adding, telling her that part was so good that we wanted to hear it more. There was rarely a time, if ever, that we’d cut something out. It had the perfect, magic ingredient. I think the tribulation of going through all these guitar players made what we had with Eve much more special. It was perfect. We do have older versions that are different, so the songs did evolve. It was a smooth growing process. It wasn’t like this, ‘What are we going to do?’ It was amazing.”
Blabbermouth: You two have different styles. How did you determine who played what part?
Jeroen: Funny enough, we weren’t always conscious of that. We arranged these basslines, and because we are so different in our playing styles and placed both basses away from the center, we decided to have Steve always on the left and me constantly on the right. That’s not going to be confusing. The cool thing is that because our bass sounds and our signature playing are so different, it’s our biggest luck here. If we were the same-sounding bass players with the same instrument and the same type of playing, we would have been screwed. Production-wise, this would have never worked. The way we started working was kind of magic because we weren’t always consciously aware of, ‘We need to do it like this.’ It kind of fell together.”
Steve: “It was more focused on the note structure and the music passages. Like Jeroen said, when we finally sat together and started recording the two basses, it was dawning on us every 20 minutes, like, ‘Holy shit. This is going to work better than we thought.’ We knew that somehow, we didn’t want two whales stuck in a saltshaker. If you get these basses together, it will be like [makes whale sound]. We didn’t know until we got there. The more we played together and the more we realized it was happening naturally. Our tones complement each other instead of conflict with each other. We were getting really psyched. I would go back to the hotel and Jeroen would text me pictures of farm equipment, like, ‘Dude. Your bass tone is killer! Check out this tractor!’ We were pretty psyched. We realized that the separation and division we needed was already happening. When we’re talking nerd, engineer talk, you’re talking ‘frequency shelving.’ Sometimes it exists in a certain frequency range, and something else that goes with it is in a different range. They can both exist without cancelling each other out and our bass tones and all the overtones, from the bottom to the top, it was so easy to dial our exact tones. We didn’t have to alter our normal sounds, not that we are stuck on a particular sound. We sound like us. We didn’t have to compromise anything in the frequency spectrum to make room for each other. As much as we are similar and appreciate all this music and play in a band together, we’re genetically totally different bass players. It totally worked. To have support musicians like Yuma and Eve who realize all their efforts are going to this silly bass dance on top of their stuff, that was pretty rare, too. Full credit to them. How many drummers and guitar players want the bass audible at all? Now you got two guys dominating the aural spectrum, taking the spolight.”
Jeroen: “Exactly. This is a point Steve and I have talked about. From our experience, we know that the bass in metal is treated different. During the years, some things can sound amazing and sound really well, but some engineers or producers say, ‘You know what? If we crank the bass with two decibels, I ruin the mix.’ We’re like, ‘Really? I don’t hear any bass. How could that damage the mix?’ What I tried to say while not being critical, as a bass player and especially in this genre, it’s so important to develop yourself as a musician, to find in metal, where bass is often pushed down, we found a concept where you really can hear the finger grip on the strings in the production itself. I think, for us, that was the standard. We really wanted to have those basses in that position in the mix. It was very new for Eve. It’s extremely rare. You don’t hear these things normally in a metal production. Maybe in funk music where the bass is crazy loud. We wanted to make sure that apart from the music, we made a statement that the bass should sometimes sound like this.”
Blabbermouth: This opens up a broader question: Is QUADVIUM an outlet to give bass playing the props it deserves in metal?
Jeroen: “It’s not our reason for doing it, but the concept of the basses dancing together in a musical approach, I think that’s the first thing. But, I think if you have the space, maybe I could compare it to the following: Why do you like death metal so much? As a bass player, and it goes for guitar players and drummers, there are no melodic vocals. Because there are monotone vocals, there’s no melodic focus. It means there’s so much room. In this concept of QUADVIUM, there’s so much room for the basses. We found two people who could visualize it. It’s not to be loud, necessarily.”
Steve: “You bring it up and make us think of it, not for the first time. It’s not a statement or revenge; it’s something we wanted to pull off together. Just the feat of our being multi-stringed, fretless instruments, making trippy music together. It’s needed in full context. We needed a quartet with the guitar and drums. There are some projects where it’s just the bass and the drummer backing. Those are fun and great to watch. We didn’t want to be like these show-off solo artists. We wanted to be this really integrated thing where at any time one thing is important, not like structured solo sections, bridges and all this stuff. Of course, it was set out to be a bass project. We’re separated in the stereo field, where you can pick us out individually. That’s the main thing. If there’s any kind of purposeful statement, we did it for us.”
Source: blabbermouth.net
