Anonymous asked: How has being apart of Rosetta affected each band members' growth as a musician?

I could make this really complicated, but it’s not. It’s simple: it’s made us better. Almost everyone I know does their best creative work in collaboration with other people. Working with other people forces compromises which aren’t really compromises, because they provoke growth and make the unit stronger.

Anonymous asked: A question for Matt (and possibly Dave):
How do you guys get you low end to be so crushing when you play live? Do you just have a certain boost pedal to push low end frequencies, or is there more to it than that?
When I saw you guys in Portland I thought my chest was about to cave in!

The bass setup is dialed in to run as cleanly as possible, so it’s delivering less mids and more bass. The guitar setup includes a slave bass amp and 1x15” cab to help push the fundamental low frequencies. During certain heavy parts (you can probably figure out which ones), the guitar kicks in with an octave pedal and the guitar and bass play in unison down in the “gut slam” region. So there’s a lot of low frequency energy bouncing around most of the time.

alphadeath asked: Hey guys, I was wondering. What are the bands you guys are listening to the most, at the moment?

Recently I’ve (Dave) been listening to the following records a lot

Oxbow - The Narcotic Story

Oxbow - King of the Jews

Comes With The Fall - Beyond the Last Light

Damiera - M(US)ic

East of the Wall - Demos

Heuristic - Parapraxes

Fight Amp - Hungry For Nothing

Elliott Smith - Either/OR

R. Kelly - Sex Planet (not an album but probably the funniest song he’s ever put out which says something)

Anonymous asked: First I want to say, you guys are amazing.....true music....my question is, how did you all meet? Have you known each other before the band? And did you guys have an idea collectively for the sound you were going for when you started up the band?

We went to high school in the same area, and knew each other through our various high school bands playing together. We wanted to do something weird and technical at first, as a side project of our other bands. But improvisation proved to be a big part of the fun, and the songs got longer and more atmospheric. That’s how Europa and Départe were born, in the Fall of 2003.

Anonymous asked: Hey Guys,

I am curious as a fellow band member, how do you guys incorporate day jobs within the band….I know there is not much money to be made in the music industry but what happens when you get back from a long tour…do you go back to a job you already have? And what kind of profits if any do you see from the record company?

It’s hard.  Day jobs are absolutely necessary because none of us make any money from the band, everything we take in goes to things like gas, repairs, recording, t-shirts, etc. We barely break even on expenses most of the time, and only take in money through touring — there are no record company profits. So we try to have jobs that are interesting to us and which are also flexible enough to let us tour (jobs like that are tough to find, but we’ve been lucky a few times). We have to be very careful about saving money when we’re at home to be able to eat while we’re on the road. It’s always a question of tradeoffs, and each person has a different view of the optimal balance between freedom and security.

Anonymous asked: can't you guys somehow talk to your record company, because all of your music is blocked for me on youtube. i'd like to quickly show my friends, but i can't, because all i find are hilariously low quality concert videos or covers from other people.

It is not our record company that does this. It’s Sony, who owns RED, through whom Translation Loss music is distributed in the USA. Neither we nor our record company can do anything about it; RED has contractual rights to exclusive distribution of TL music in the US and is free to do whatever they want with that. As much as it bums everybody out, believe us when we say we had nothing to do with any of this and can do absolutely nothing about it.

Anonymous asked: whats the worst and best thing that's even happened to you on a tour or a show

This is an almost impossible question to answer, in part because each of the four of us would have a completely different answer. Some examples of best would include:  
-Getting fed! Always great.
-Crowd-surfing at a living room show in Arcata, CA. 
-Playing a new place and everyone knows the words.
-Meeting your heroes. 

Some examples of worst would include: 
-Drunk 40-year-old pulling Dave’s bass amp off the cab and stage (falling 15 feet to the floor) while we’re playing. 
-Drunk crustpunk trying to unplug all Matt’s equipment while we’re playing, forcing Matt to kick him in the face (no joke, what an awful feeling).
-Getting paid nothing to play to a packed room because “the door was polled” and not enough people said your band name. 
-Any time anybody gets hurt, a van breaks down, or equipment dies. 

thechibisama asked: I absolutely love your music. Everytime i hear it, i think about... freedom. The releasing of our inhibitions and who we are. Your music is powerful and so --- beautiful. Now i'm no artist describing music, but i've listened to loads of music and your music is beyond the level of the 'mainstream garbage'.

But i wanted to ask, what is your inspiration? Is it always space?

Anyways, i love you guys, please continue to keep up the good work and stick to your shit (don't change from what is mainstream and lame). I love you guys because you have an identity. When i first read yr profile i was taken back because you guys aren't about God-bashing, naked women and vulgar topics, but you actually write about what is beautiful and living, and thats so awesome to have a band who does that.

You guys rock, i will be asking more questions. I love you guys..gah. Rock on boys!!

From yr biggest female fan in the caribbean. (i'd say the world, but i'd be stoned from other chicks.)

We appreciate the kind words. We joke sometimes about how male-dominated our audience seems to be, but underneath the joking is a real concern that metal disproportionately alienates women. It’s appropriate that it alienates a lot of people, because it’s an “outsider art,” but at the same time, if it excludes certain groups more than others, that’s not good. I (Matt) have thought a lot about whether that’s something that’s intrinsic to the sound, or if it’s more related to the visual trappings. My hope is that it’s the extras, not the core of the sound, that skews white and male.

As to where we get inspiration from: it’s not always space. In fact, it really hasn’t been space for a long time. The imagery of space travel has persisted, but most of our inspiration comes from personal experience. When we write songs, the music gets written before the lyrics. The music is created through a process of experimentation and looking inward to try and find what “works” and then develop it. At some point, the lyrics become part of that process of development, so the end product is very organic and interrelated. The hope is that a finished song will express something that maybe couldn’t have been put into words in the first place, because it was too intuitive, or too big for articulation. Everybody looks for transcendence in their own way. A lot of what is fascinating about music is how it refuses to submit to rational/biological explanation or analysis.

Anonymous asked: I know it's not the usual question you get, but I gotta ask: how do you feel about the tragedy that hit Japan? And in regard to that, what do you think about nuclear energy in general?

We probably don’t feel much differently from other people. It’s terrible. Nobody should have to go through that, and to suggest that anyone deserves that kind of experience is ridiculous. I will say that those nuclear plant workers who decided to stay — to keep trying to shut things down, despite huge risks — those guys have balls. How can anyone not respect that kind of tenacity? They are just regular working dudes, and we will probably never hear what they have to say about anything, but they are trying to save people’s lives, potentially at the cost of their own.

As far as nuclear energy, probably none of us is educated enough to give a real opinion on that. We live in Pennsylvania, so we use electricity that was generated by nuclear reactors. We also use a lot of coal-generated electricity. Every technique is a set of trade-offs, but I’d take nuclear over coal any day of the week.

Anonymous asked: I have a question for Matt,
I know that you use several effects pedals in you lineup. How do you feel about maintaining signal integrity? Any certain cables or techniques that you use?

My personal opinion is that the “true bypass” thing is over-hyped. I have had no problems with the “dreaded Boss buffers” and have run extensive tests comparing noise and frequency response between buffered and true-bypass pedals. True-bypass causes more loading to the guitar’s output signal, and makes signal integrity an unpredictable thing. Buffered pedals, assuming that the buffers can be operated cleanly with high input levels (Boss can, some others not so much), maintain the signal better and make factors like cable capacitance irrelevant. Cables are cables, and every test I’ve ever done supports this.

Power supply quality is probably the most important thing. Cheapy wall-warts cause noise, and no amount of true-bypassing or cable swapping is going to fix that. Most of the time when someone comes to me about “tone suck” it’s because their power supply can’t deliver the current that their pedals require, or is injecting noise into the signal path. With buffered pedals you hear the supply sag or noise even when the pedal is off, contributing to their undeserved negative reputation.

I’ll also say that when touring, reliability is extremely important. I have Boss pedals that have been submerged underwater for three days and survived. I can’t afford to have a bunch of $300 boutique pedals on my board that break or short out when they get knocked around. 99% of touring guitar players I know will tell you the same thing.