Visionary musician, composer, and producer Devin Townsend performed his rock opera “The Moth” live for the first time on Thursday, March 27 together with the Noord Nederlands Orkest (North Netherlands Symphony Orchestra) symphony orchestra at De Oosterpoort in Groningen, Netherlands. A second performance of “The Moth” will take place tonight (Friday, March 28) at the same venue.
Fan-filmed video of the March 27 concert can be seen below.
This show is exclusive and is only being performed in Groningen; it will not be staged anywhere else in the world.
Townsend is renowned for his groundbreaking fusion of metal, progressive rock, and ambient music. With a career spanning more than 30 years, he has pushed the boundaries of musical genres and collaborated with world-famous orchestras, establishing an unparalleled artistic legacy.
For his latest project, he has teamed up with the Noord Nederlands Orkest and composed “The Moth”, a “rock opera” he has been working on for years, which represents his lifelong ambition. “The Moth” tells the story of the human experience from birth to death, comparable to the transformation of a caterpillar into a moth. It symbolizes the human quest for meaning and offers perspectives on the fear of death through analogy and narrative. Ever since Townsend witnessed large musicals such as “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Phantom Of The Opera” in the 1970s, he has seen this project as his calling.
“The Moth” has been in the making for over a decade, and Townsend has been building towards it for 30 years. Now, he has shared the stage at De Oosterpoort in Groningen with no less than seventy musicians from the Noord Nederlands Orkest, a sixty-member choir, and his own band, which includes Mike Keneally, Joseph Stephenson, Darby Todd and James Leach.
In a recent video message, Devin stated about “The Moth”: “I have been working on this for ten years.
“Now let me tell you how it started. I had to start by figuring out, I had to start taking classes. ‘Cause when I was a teen, when I was a kid, my dream was always to make sort of a modern opera, in a way, with modern themes, modern instrumentation, and a lot of the things that I had been fascinated by in my youth — ‘Phantom Of The Opera’, ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, ‘Paint Your Wagon’, all those sorts of things, were really impactful to me as a youth because the emotions were so broad that it was easy for me to understand. It’s always very obvious when you’re watching these sorts of things when something is happy, when something is sad. And I had to start from the very beginning, 10 years ago, learning how to write, how to navigate the logistics of and how to deliver on time an opera, I guess, in some sense. Starting with I had to take lessons in composition, because although I know how to write music, of course, I never knew theory. So when I was working with orchestras, for example, with smaller projects like ‘Deconstruction’ or even the one in Bulgaria. I had to learn the language so I wasn’t wasting time because it’s so expensive to work with these choirs and orchestras. So, I started taking lessons about 10 years ago. And I finally figured out how I could pull off making this uncompromised musical statement with hundreds of people — creatively no boundaries, nobody telling me what to do. The only way I could do that was to do it myself. So, my friends, I’ve invested everything I have into making ‘The Moth’, into making this facility so I could make ‘The Moth’, in order to get the best players, in order to get the best orchestras, in order to get the best artists.
“For much of my life I’ve been wanting to do these things, which is such epic scale, but then whenever I say to somebody, like, ‘Hey, this is what I want,’ they said, ‘Well, STRAPPING YOUNG LAD‘ or ‘you’re a heavy metal musician,'” he continued. “And up to this point, there’s been a lot of doubting that my capacity to not only pull it off musically, but also logistically — it requires a certain type of mentality, I believe. And so in the beginning, when I was proposing making operas and making these kind of heavy metal, crazy orchestral things, the reaction to that from people was, ‘Well, we don’t feel that you are capable of doing that,’ or, ‘We don’t feel like you’re ready to do that’, or, ‘It requires a level of expertise specific to this type of musical vocation to pull it off, which you don’t have. Therefore, if you wanna do it, you have to hire somebody for exorbitant amounts of money.’ So, I said, ‘Fuck it,’ and I put together a team of about 12 people, and I have funded it independently from the very beginning to the very end.
“North Netherlands National Symphony And Choir … proposed this to me about three years ago. They said, ‘Listen, if you’re serious about this, we’re one of the most elite orchestras in Europe. And if you’re serious about it, we’re willing to take a chance on your vision.’ And so I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ And I built a place to make ‘The Moth’. I put together teams so I can delegate each aspect of it — choirs go to this team, orchestra goes to this team, scoring goes to this team, orchestrating goes to this team, the band themselves. Everything needed to be sort of logistically set up ahead of time so that you could have a strategy about it. Because, for example, trying to deliver the choir parts in a timely fashion, the way that it ended up happening is the choir required the delivery of their musical scores prior to the orchestra. And the orchestra needed to get it prior to the band getting it. So I had to write the music with teams in different locations at different times, and it’s almost like concurrently five jigsaw puzzles. And the hope is that when they’re all together, it will create the vision that I’ve been following for so long.
“‘The Moth’ is a story, I guess, about transformation, obviously, steeped in sort of existential nebulousness, which is — I don’t even know if ‘nebulousness’ is a word, but that’s kind of where I’ve been for my whole life. And when somebody said, ‘Okay, do you wanna do this ‘Moth’ project?’ At first, I had this vision of it being this kind of obscene thing, but then the more I started getting into it, the more I recognized that the format could yield unbelievably intense things.
“So the people involved with this. My god. So the band — it’s the band I’ve been touring with: Darby [Todd], James [Leach], Mike Keneally, new guitar player Pete Rinaldi. Involved with this, I managed to work with an incredible orchestrator, Joseph Stephenson. I worked with Steve Vai… So he’s helped with the intermission. I’ve got artists from all over the world, different time zones, putting together ‘The Moth’. We tracked the drums in Gothenburg two months ago.”
Devin added: “Here’s the thing with ‘The Moth’. To do this, I had to write it. and then the shows, originally, when I had proposed doing this, the people who were involved with this were kind of on the fence about whether or not it was gonna work, and there was lots of talk about liability and all these sorts of things, like, ‘If this doesn’t sell by March, you’re liable for however much.’ … And so I was, like, ‘All right, let’s try it.’ And so we put it up and you guys rocked it for us. Holy cow. So the two shows sold out in four minutes, I believe. And then they said, ‘Well, we can’t do the VIPs,’ but the VIPs sold out in seven minutes. This is all fantastic votes of confidence — not necessarily for me, but for the nature of this type of creative endeavor in the future. I’ve got these teams together, and if this works, my thought is I could do one of these every couple of years, and just creatively completely free, completely uncompromised, with the best players, the best work, the best sound. And up to this point I haven’t been able to do it because no one wanted to take a chance. So I funded it myself, the show sold, we’re good to go.
“Now here’s the thing: the cost of this — if we’re lucky, if we’re lucky, we would break even on these shows. Even though it’s sold out, even though the VIPs. So what does one do when one is debuting live a record of such scope that nothing that I’ve done even holds a candle to the scope of this. But usually what happens is you release a record and you can meticulously mix it and master it and massage it so that there’s no rough edges and everything, and then you put it out and then you perform it. So what was proposed to me was, we do it the other way around. After ten years of writing this, the debut of ‘The Moth’ is actually this live performance. And what that throws into the works is just staggering amounts of logistical problems. It has to be recorded, mixed, completed lyrically, orchestrally, score, the band. Everybody has to know it. Everybody has to have the redundancy and the click tracks and all these things going so that you can have the orchestra. And the orchestra has a different click than the band. And the band has a different click than the visuals. And how you put that together logistically to debut that, without an album. So the first that anybody’s going to hear of ‘The Moth’ is this show. So they proposed to me — because prior to this, we weren’t gonna break even on the shows, which is fine. I’m cool. We haven’t broken even for 10 years — on ‘The Moth’. And someone proposed, ‘Well, what would you think about doing a livestream?’ And I thought, well, in the past, the livestreams have been so janky. And without control over the sound, it’s like all of a sudden you got one loud kick drum and the guitars are wrong. And the nuance of this is so subtle that the proposition of doing a live stream of this was absurd to me. However, the more I started thinking about it, I thought, ‘Well, fuck it, if we’re actually debuting this’ — what’s the term my grandfather always used to say? God hates a coward. So we decided, I decided, we decided to do the livestream of the second night. Now, here’s the thing with this live stream. I was, like, ‘I don’t wanna do it poorly. I don’t want this to not be awesome.’
“So my plan for this is because of the amount of logistics and the amount of work — hundreds of people, literally, and I think there’s probably a hundred and fifty people on stage of this too. So ‘The Moth’ is meant to be a vocal showcase, it’s meant to be a kind of vocal tour de force, in a sense. I will be doing an acoustic, and with the band, augmentation of ‘The Moth’, so you’ve got a full two hours of entertainment. ‘The Moth’ itself, words can’t describe how much work has gone into this.
“I forget how many tickets we have to sell for the thing to break even, for the livestream. I’m not even talking about the show, ’cause the live stream, it’s all cross collateralized. So the livestream and the show and the merch and the VIPs, they all go to this pot with this choir, with this orchestra, with the visuals. We made this film. I’ve got 12 geniuses that I work with and we’ve been working on the stories and everything like this. And the first we’re gonna hear from it is this livestream. And I forget how many tickets we have to sell for the livestream show we have to sell for the show to break even — something like 5,000. You know what? If it doesn’t fucking break even, I don’t care. I really don’t. I’ll figure it out. But it would be better if it did.”
For more information on “The Moth” livestream, click here.
Townsend‘s career is one of many distinct eras. He’s been the leader of STRAPPING YOUNG LAD, the lynchpin of the DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT and the co-architect of country duo CASUALTIES OF COOL, all while maintaining his prolific and lauded solo project. More recently he completed work on “PowerNerd”, a succinct but still progressive record that pulls from its mastermind’s childhood love of vintage rock.
Townsend has an amazing variety in his musical style. He works in ranges of hard rock, progressive metal, new age and ambient. As a solo artist he has had a lineup of various artist working on his albums sporting his infinite variety.
When he revisited his music career, it was with the founding of the DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT. The project began with a series of four albums each written in a different style and released between 2009-2011. Afterwards he kept to the DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT and keeps releasing under this name.
Across all Townsend‘s bands and projects, he has released more than two dozen studio albums and several live ones. Similar in all of these are his versatile vocal delivery that ranges from screaming to an opera-esque singing. The same diversity appears in his writing. Townsend‘s musical style has roots in metal but draws elements from other genres into the material. Each album is written to express different aspects of his personality.
Source: blabbermouth.net
