Devin Townsend. The title conjures pictures of a kaleidoscope of kinds, a endless exploration that shatters style boundaries with glee. To restrict him to the metallic label is like making an attempt to restrict the ocean in a teacup. Or to explain the Grand Canyon as a “gap within the floor.” But many nonetheless paint him in that nook alone.
His genre-hopping may ruffle some feathers, however Townsend shrugs it off. He isn’t confused by others’ confusion, he is bewildered by their insistence on musical segregation.
“It is not like if you’re in a sure style it’s best to restrict your self to that, in any other case you are stepping exterior. It is like there is no nuance between opinions recently, is what it appears,” he defined in a latest chat with MusicRadar. “It is not like you possibly can say, ‘I do imagine that however I additionally imagine that. I agree with you. I additionally agree with them, and someplace between that, it is a gray space. It is not so black and white.’ Listening habits for me have been by no means black and white. I beloved the whole lot – apart from the stuff that I did not love and I completely hated!”
“I believe after I first got here out folks have been like, ‘I do not perceive.’ It appears indicative of some form of schizophrenic persona dysfunction that you’d launch one thing like ‘Oh My Fucking God’ after which additionally do issues like ‘Factor Past Issues’, or do ‘Dying Of Music’, or ‘Punky Brewster’, and I used to be all the time confused by that as a result of I believed, ‘No. I like all of these various things.” Townsend added.
And it is that very freedom that fuels Townsend‘s inventive hearth, unchained by style expectations: “It’s a easy factor. I’m a musician – not a genre-dependent musician. It is simply I like all types of music. In the identical means that my aesthetic was knowledgeable by musical theatre, it’s precisely the identical with these listening habits I had in my 20s, proper?”
From the guttural growls of Strapping Young Lad to the atmospheric shimmer of Ocean Machine, Townsend‘s sonic palette defies categorization. He is gushed over Judas Priest one minute, spun electronica yarns the following, after which serenaded you with a heart-wrenching ballad earlier than you can even blink. What he’ll conjure subsequent, will in all probability be something however black and white.
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