Ryan Sequeira - Ontario Metal
Mick Moss - (Antimatter)

Ryan: The new album is called “Planetary Confinement.” What is the significance of the album’s title?

Mick: It signifies the ultimate pessimistic view of life on Earth. This planet can be a playground or a prison depending on how positive or negative you are. Duncan came up with the title for a track on the album, and I thought it was perfectly suited to be the overall title.

One thing that immediately stood out from the sound of your last studio album Lights Out, was the integration of the acoustic guitar, and real drums, both of which add a much warmer, natural feel to the music. Was this a planned thing or did it just naturally flow from all the acoustic recordings of the unreleased stuff?

In addition to this added warmth to the music, I also noticed a diminished use of electronic elements. Was this also intentional?

Mick: We planned to do an album based on acoustic guitars, and the idea grew from there. I decided that if I was to record with acoustic guitars then in fact every instrument should be natural. I purposefully chose to abandon all electronic instruments even up to the point where when Danny Cavanagh offered to play piano on my session, I refused because he would have been playing a synthesiser instead of a real piano. The idea to use live drums again came from this ideology of 100% pure sound.

The last studio album, Lights Out, was a concept album of sorts. Does Planetary Confinement also carry this characteristic? If so, what is the concept? If not, why did you choose not to make this a concept album?

Mick: Three of my tracks are about the city I live in, and the other one is about memories of a house from my youth, which just happens to be in the city I live in. It’s not intentional at all, but Liverpool is the thread that ties all my tracks together. I didn’t even realise this for about a year after I finished my sessions.

The lyrics on Planetary Confinement seem introspective and very negative. This style of lyrical expression was also evident, to a certain extent, on Lights Out. Is this just a trademark of Antimatter?

Mick: I suppose so, I guess it’s just born from the fact that I don’t find it interesting or worthy to write about positive thoughts or feelings. Also, positive thoughts and feelings prompt me to do other things than sit and write lyrics.

The album credits indicate that Duncan and Mick recorded tracks separately, with entirely different bands. How did that happen? Why did it happen that way?

Mick: We live in separate countries, so in the end it was much easier just to record in our own country in our own time. This way it was really informal and created the kind of laid-back approach that was essential for this album. Anything more pressurised or formal would probably resulted in the album not being recorded, or certainly some major problems.

It seems that Antimatter has a talent for finding female vocalists with divine voices. How do you do it?!

Mick: Well, personally I don’t do it - Duncan has always been the one to find vocalists because obviously he needs people to sing his lyrics. I agree, though, Michelle, Hayley and Amelie each have amazing tones to their voices.

Two-part question: Seeing as Duncan Patterson is leaving Antimatter, how will this affect the future of the band? Also, how will this affect tour plans for the rest of the year (if there are any)?

Mick: I’m not really interested in touring anyway. There are people I’m sure who enjoy being on a stage, who feel it is somehow empowering and an ego-boost, but I’m not one of those people. I’ve always felt a bit weird having hundreds of pairs of eyes on me all at the same time in a silent hall where the only thing you can hear is your own voice over a loudspeaker.
As for the future of Antimatter, I will record an album in 2006 called ‘Leaving Eden’. It’s music that I’ve had aside for some time and would have ended up on the next Antimatter album anyway, so in my world it makes absolutely no difference.

I’ve noticed that Antimatter has been keeping a fairly low profile in printed media. Why is this?

Mick: I can suggest that this is possibly due to the fact that magazines tend to be genre based, and we are hard to fit into a genre, therefore we are hard to fit into a magazine.

With your somewhat close relationship to the metal world (Anathema, The End Records), do you think this limits the audiences that you can reach with your quite-obviously-not-metal music?

Mick: With every genre you tend to get a really static audience, which in itself is limited. When you then start to break down that limited audience into sub-levels, like you would a metal audience into the fraction that would in fact be receptive to non-metal music, then you limit the numbers once again. So, yeah, the audience we can reach is limited in terms of how we are being promoted. However, friendships between intelligent people are not based solely upon what genre of music you listen to, therefore finding new music from friends is a way that albums can bleed through genre barriers, so there is always a way that Antimatter can find its way into the hands of non-metal listeners and from there onwards through the peer system into a different audience altogether.

What is your take on the current state of music and how the Internet is affecting it?

Mick: When I was a teenager, I had to save up all my pocket money and every week I would have just enough to travel into town and buy one second-hand piece of vinyl from the record store. For the rest of that week I would listen to that one album and really get to know it, get to know all the track titles and which songs I enjoyed and which I didn’t. Obviously, some albums weren’t that accessible on first listen, but on repeated listens I would notice new stuff and the album would become more and more rewarding with every spin. I can imagine the kind of confusion I would have had if I had taken home every single piece of vinyl from the shop at once (probably over 1,000) and then began trawling through each one. This is basically what you have nowadays with the ability to download any album that you want. Internet users have their own personal HMV at their fingertips and greed is taking over - I’m sure people are downloading more albums than they have time to listen to. Now albums are achieving this utterly throwaway status, where you listen to each one only once then move on to the next 50 that you feel like downloading.

On behalf of Ontario Metal, I’d like to thank you very much for doing this interview, and wish you the best of luck for the future.

Mick: Cheers , can I just say that there is still an album for free download at www.antimatter.tk. 'Antimatter Unreleased 98-03' features 16 tracks of live recordings, acoustic versions, original demos and exclusive versions. There will also be a free virtual video E.P. up for download as from August 8th. 'Antimatter 030306' features 4 tracks recorded before a live audience.