(I got sort of caught up in all the year-end Listmania we’ve been feeding you on this site, and am therefore late in publishing this guest opinion piece by Jesper Zuretti of The Binary Code. Check this out and let us [and Jesper} know what you think.  Are we putting too much emphasis on recording quality?)

We Are the 3%: Recording Quality v. Song Quality
a novice attempt at history, psychology, and temptation

Many people hearing music in this day and age tend to put the quality of the recording in the forefront, even ahead of the quality of the composition and music. But how much does the music-hearing individual really understand about the quality of the recording they’re listening to? Should they need to understand anything at all? Should music be over-scrutinized and classified into the depths of genre segregation, with fine-tuning into multiple combinations of classification?

The best part about music, in my opinion, is the freedom you have with it, and yet people are probably pickier about music than they are the food they eat. The history of music proves to us that recording (although it’s the conduit to our musical stream) is but a small aspect of music’s place in the entirety of human existence. I’m no certified musicologist (although I’d like to think I am), but maybe we’ll open some minds – just bear in mind that I’m a long-winded typist! Stay with me:

Human beings have been making music as long as the species has existed. The human voice is considered one of the first instruments we ever used to make music. And beyond that, Humpback whales also spend a great deal of time creating music (and by “great deal of time,” we’re talking Frank Zappa amounts of time). So it’s very safe to assume that music was being created even before mankind came into existence. On that assumption, if you subtract the amount of time during which humans have actually captured music on recordings from the length of time whales have been on this planet (speculated to be 54 million years), you end up with less than 3% of music’s supposed development time dedicated to recording.

(As part of our series of posts on the Year in Metal, we invited musicians from some of our favorite bands to tell us what 2011 albums made an impression on them. Today, we hear from Jesse Zuretti, the talented guitarist and song-writer from The Binary Code.)

Although I’ve assembled a top 15 list, I highly encourage you to check out my honorable mentions down below. There were too many good releases this year.

1. Talib Kweli – Gutter Rainbows

This album, albeit non-metal, is packed with nostalgia for me. Hearing Ed Lover’s voice on this album was icing on the cake. Talib Kweli is one of the most well-versed rhymers of all time. His music is passionate, original, powerful, and adventurous. Listening to his lyrics is like hearing someone you look up to tell a story about something you relate to, and just exceeding your expectations with the outcome.

Why is this album number one for me? Because this is the first album of the entire year that made me say, “HOLY SHIT!” out loud. I’m not a man of uncontrollable, Tourette Syndrome-esque outbursts at the drop of a note from an artist – be it metal, hip hop, jazz, etc. Those “HOLY SHIT!” moments are generally found when something along the lines of a Pat Metheny solo rips into gear, or when Dennis Chambers flails into a comet trail of fills and ghost notes over a Victor Wooten tune. Talib Kweli handcrafted sound, lyrics, and power into a unique and TOLERABLE hip-hop album in the grand year of 2011. Fuck-all rare if you ask me, considering the amount of cocky-yarble these pretend gangster womanizer rappers have been pooping out into our wretched youths’ ears. Take a minute, pop on this disc (or WINRAR your Mediafire link) and let it roll.

This post is devoted to the third of the songs I heard this morning that caused me to shout “FUCKING GOOD PANCAKE!!”, which caused my cat to spontaneously evacuate his bowels, undoubtedly because he is not conversant in Google Translate renditions of Finnish idiom into English. The fact that he is almost 20 years old and now seems prone to spontaneous evacuation may also have something to do with it. However, just to be safe, the next time I hear a song as hot as these three, I plan to whisper fucking good pancake.

This last, but not least, part of my morning discoveries is the latest pre-production track to be posted for listening by The Binary Code.  My admiration for this band goes back to a time when both NCS and the band were in their infancy, so to speak — though The Binary Code never seemed to take baby steps. In their music, they were fully mature from the outset, whereas I’m still breast-feeding.

Although we have written about The Binary Code frequently, reviewing all of their musical output to date, it’s been a while since we checked in with them. They haven’t exactly been sitting still since the release of their Priest EP last summer (reviewed here). Yesterday, they added to their Facebook band page the third of three new pre-production tracks. The latest song is called “Dark Meditations”, and it is indeed a dark, heavy, atmospheric instrumental. Part ambient cloudscape, part jolting, pneumatic riff-fest, part progressive guitar exploration, it’s just fucking good pancake from beginning to end. Cool bass line in this song, too.

Check it out after the jump, and we’ll throw in the first two pre-production tracks for your listening pleasure, too. Both of them are tremendously good. By the way, these may be pre-production tracks, but they sound pretty fucking finished to me. In fact, they sound like The Binary Code’s best work to date.

A few years ago my day job took me to Spokane pretty regularly. It’s in far eastern Washington, near the Idaho border. Culturally and politically, it’s a world apart from Seattle. The town itself is not much to look at, but you drive 20 minutes in just about any direction, and you’re surrounded by physical beauty. I also liked every person I met there — every one.

There’s metal in and around Spokane. Every now and then a group of us will make the drive east to catch a tour that inexplicably hits Spokane but bypasses Seattle, and there’s usually a good turnout of headbangers. But for new bands, it’s probably not an ideal place to launch a career. Not that we really know what we’re talking about — it’s just a guess.

So our dog-like ears perked up when we saw a Facebook post from the always-interesting Jesse Zuretti (The Binary Code) recommending that his friends check out a 3-piece Spokane band called Odyssey. Not something we could resist, (a) because of the source of the recommendation, and (b) because of the band’s location.

Odyssey has just released a new 4-song EP called Schematics, which follows on the heels of their September ’09 hour-long debut album, Objects in Space. It’s the EP that we’ve now heard, and it’s very strong. No clean singing on that EP, or any other kind of singing. It’s an instrumental brain scrambler that’s completely engrossing. We’ll try to explain why . . . after the jump.

The subject of today’s post is an interview of Jesse Zuretti, the guitarist and co-creator of the musical juggernaut that is The Binary Code (whose new EP we reviewed here).

If you’re like me, when you see the word “interview” on a metal site, you sub-vocalize the words “Fuck that shit” and click away as fast as your fast-twitch muscle fibers will allow your finger to work. Why is that? If you’re like me, there are two reasons:

First, most interview questions are stupifyingly inane. Even when the interviewer actually has a functioning brain, many of them are just fucking lazy. So they ask questions that involve no thought or effort, and they get repaid in kind with the answers.

Seriously, if I were a musician and had to answer one thoughtless, cliched, repetitive, dull-as-dishwater question after another, year after year, I’d be sorely tempted to pull an Ernest Hemingway and put a 12-gauge Boss shotgun in my mouth.

Second, a person can be an extraordinarily talented artist but still be inarticulate or simply uninteresting as a conversationalist — even when the questions are halfway decent. Being really good at one thing doesn’t mean you’re really good at everything else.  To step outside the realm of music, when’s the last time you read an interview of a pro athlete or a movie star that you actually found interesting, that made you think, that opened your eyes to a new idea?

That’s not intended as a put-down. It’s just a fact. Being a talented artist doesn’t automatically make you an innovative thinker or a fascinating raconteur, just as being a diehard metal fan doesn’t make you an adept interviewer. Many people who train and work hard as professional reporters still don’t make the grade as good interviewers, so why should we expect that just being a devoted fan is enough?

Why, then, should you read this interview? Is it because I’m an extraordinarily good interviewer? Well, fuck no. All I can tell you is that I tried to think of questions that weren’t the usual dreck. Whether or not I succeeded is something you should judge for yourselves.

No, the main reason you should read this interview is because of Jesse Zuretti. He’s one of those rare people in the metal scene (a) who is a naturally gifted musician and songwriter, (b) who listens to lots of music and thinks seriously about it , (c) who thinks a lot about things other than music, (d) whose opinions and ideas are unorthodox for this scene, and (d) who can express what he thinks in words that are worth reading — and that make you think. Also, even when my questions were retarded, he was patient and serious in his answers.

Well, at least that’s my opinion.  You can judge all that for yourselves too — but you really shouldn’t miss this. Naturally, we start by talking about the new EP, but things go off in other directions after that.   (after the jump. . . .)

We’ve made no secret about our admiration for The Binary Code. We thought their 2009 debut album, Suspension of Disbelief, was a remarkably accomplished work, both in conception and in execution (our review of that album can be found here).

In an interview that accompanied our album review, we found the band’s guitarist and co-songwriter Jesse Zuretti to be an unusually thoughtful and engaging dude. And when we finally got to see The Binary Code play live, as part of the METAL AS ART tour in January, we were blown away by the band’s maturity on stage and the intensity of their performance (as we said here).

So with all that, it should come as no surprise that we’ve been eagerly awaiting the band’s new EP, Priest, which is scheduled for official release on August 10. We’ve now been lucky enough to get an advance listen to the three songs on the EP (and a bonus “alternate” version of one of those songs that’s also included).

Our confidence in this band’s future was not misplaced. Priest represents another step forward for a band that was already bursting with talent and exceptional creativity. The more we’ve listen to Priest, the more we’ve found in it, and the more impressed we’ve become. This is the kind of music that engages on both a visceral and a cerebral level — it kicks like a pissed-off mule and makes you think at the same time.  (more after the jump . . .)

We have seen the future of extreme metal, and it is bright!

The METAL AS ART tour featuring Hypno5e, Revocation, and The Binary Code is one we’ve been waiting for with bated breath for months. We’ve been curious about Hypno5e and huge fans of Revocation and The Binary Code for a while now (we’ve written about our admiration for Revocation here and The Binary Code here and here).

On January 26, the wait ended as the tour rolled into Seattle’s Studio Seven, with support from local band 7 Horns 7 Eyes — which was the biggest revelation of the night — and two of your NCS Authors were there.

This was, bar none, one of the best shows from end to end that we’ve seen in many moons. These are young bands that are capable of carrying the future of extreme metal on their shoulders.  If merit counts for anything (and unfortunately, it doesn’t always), these hard-working dudes will find a place in the vanguard and the kind of widespread notice they deserve.

For our detailed review of the performances and a big collection of our amateurish photos, continue on after the jump . . . .

Here at NCS, we’ve been putting a different spin on year-end listmania. Ours isn’t a list of the best metal full-lengths of the year. It’s not even necessarily our list of the best individual extreme metal songs of the year. What we decided to do was create a list of the most infectious extreme metal songs we’ve heard this year. We’re talking about songs that produce involuntary physical movement and worm their way into your brain to such an extent you can’t get ‘em out (and wouldn’t want to).

We haven’t ranked our list from #10 to #1 because that would be too much fucking work (and your co-Authors would still be arguing about it this time next year). In addition, when we started naming our entries on this site, we hadn’t yet figured out the whole list. So, we’ve been dribbling them out one at a time, in no particular order.

Of course, only after naming the first 9 entries did it dawn on us that we only had one spot left. If only our tiny brains hadn’t been hard-wired with the decimal system we could have made this “The Fourteen Most Infection Extreme Metal Songs of 2009.” But you reap what you sow. With only one spot left, and still lots of songs on our collection of candidates, picking #10 proved to be especially vexing for your Authors. But now it’s done.

Our list heretofore:

1. Asphyx: Sorbutics

2. Mastodon: Crack the Skye

3. Amorphis: Silver Bride

4. Goatwhore: Apocalyptic Havoc

5. August Burns Red: Meridian

6. Pelican: Ephemeral

7. Scale the Summit: Age of the Tide

8. Daath:  Wilting On the Vine

9.  Molotov Solution:  The Harbinger

And to see our tenth and final entry on the list, continue reading after the jump.

Yesterday we frothed at the mouth over The Binary Code, its just-released full-length Suspenson of Disbelief, and the kick-ass “Metal As Art” tour that The Binary Code is about to launch with Hypno5e and NCS favorites, Revocation. In the course of preparing that post, we put a few questions to the band’s guitarist and co-songwriter Jesper Zuretti, and the dude was good enough to indulge us. Yesterday’s post was so damn long that we didn’t want Jesper’s answers to get lost in the rest of our verbiage, so we deferred publication of the interview til today. If you’re already a Binary Code fan or just beginning to get curious about the band, there’s some interesting revelations in there. Read our interview of Jesper after the jump:

Last week we put up a brief, rushed post about the one-day-only streaming of The Binary Code‘s December 15 full-length release on MetalSucks.net — brief and rushed because we wanted to give our readers the chance to listen to Suspension of Disbelief before the stream evaporated into the ether. But now it’s time to explain why we thought that alert was worth doing.  And tomorrow, in Part 2, we’ll also share with you our e-mail interview with The Binary Code‘s guitarist/songwriter Jesper Zuretti. Trust me, it’s worth coming back here to read that.

First, the explanation of why we care about this band.  In three words:  shitloads of talent. At all the levels that count. Prodigious technical instrumentation; complex, beautifully structured song-writing; the ability to dive deeply into the technical/progressive side of death metal while at the same time incorporating compulsive grooves and elements of jazz; an abundantly evident creative intelligence that promises future growth. All that and more make Suspension of Disbelief a very impressive full-length debut and The Binary Code a band worth watching closely.

As a reader, I usually lose patience with album reviewers who feel compelled to offer observations about every last track on an album. But there’s so much going on in Suspension of Disbelief that I don’t know how else to fucking do it. So, here goes:

The album begins with a powerful, genre-defying one-two punch. “Suspension of Disbelief (Part I)” is a furious, pummeling, riffage-and-blast-beat-filled onslaught that showcases the band’s technical talent. And then without warning, the music shifts gears into “Suspension of Disbelief (Part II)” — a prog-metal influenced, largely instrumental track that begins and ends with down-tempo atmospheric soloing with high-intensity riffage packed in between. “Mechanical Seas” is tech-death with a groove, but punctuated with melodic synth interludes. “Ghost Planet” is more blast-furnace death metal, featuring a mix of deep gutterals, high-pitched shrieking, and chants; screaming guitar interludes; and some awesome syncopated interplay on the low end between bass and skins. And then there’s a “what the hell?” moment: The closest label I can affix to “Void I” is metal-infused progressive jazz.

Following a brief musical interlude, the band then launches into “The Story,” another genre-bending, technically complex piece with multiple tempo changes, jazzy interludes, and even more vocal variation (including flashes of clean singing). Following another brief instrumental interlude, the band explores the “Human Condition” — more unexpected tempo changes, brutal vocals, crashing riffs and machine-gun bass-and-drum work alternating with more episodes of progressive jazz. “Awaiting Necropolis” is another foray into tech-death territory with probably the most head-bangable rhythms on the album. And then, to finish off this mind-blowing collection we come to “Void II,” another melodic, jazz-influenced number.