Can you give us a brief history of Jagged Doctrine?
In 1996, Jagged Doctrine was created by myself and J
Gates as an
experimental Industrial 2 piece. From July of 96 to December of 97, Jagged
Doctrine created a handful of songs and appeared on 3 compilations. In 98, I
decided to take the band into a harder but more accessible direction. I
called long time friend and guitar extraordinaire, Rod Middleton. At that
point, we started recording pretty heavily. J dropped out of the band in
February 98, while Rod and I recorded 2 times a month 12 hours per session.
From 1998 – 2004, we’ve recorded 7 full length CD’s as well as a few
remixes.
How did you come up with the name Jagged
Doctrine?
In July of 96 when Jagged Doctrine was conceived, J & I were driving to a
Larry Norman concert in North Carolina. We were brainstorming different
ideas. I wanted something meaningful for a name. After many ideas we
discussed, we came up with Jagged Doctrine. Jagged represents the music,
Doctrine represents the origin.
As you know, I have every JD CD ever released,
and to this day, I can't
decide which song is my favorite, let alone which album. Good stuff. How
about you? What are some of your favorites?
It seems to vary— Down, Dirty, 6 String Suicide, I
Don’t Know,
Cut-ta-ho-tha, Self Inflicted seem to be ones that I still listen to more
often than others.
As for favorite album, I’d have to go with Darkness Wrapped in Plastic.
Although The Circle Trilogy Soundtrack is my favorite in that I feel like we
accomplished a lot with that CD.
How about other bands? Who do you enjoy
listening to? What bands would you
say "influenced" you in your own style?
Larry Norman is my favorite artist. Bride was another favorite. I listen
to many current artists including Thousand Foot Krutch, Pillar, and I have
recently been enjoying the debut from indie band (manufraQ’ture).
Deitiphobia is the band the introduced me to Electronic Industrial. That
changed how I listened to music. They used electronic sounds that you
didn’t hear in standard rock bands. Mortal was another big influence in the
style. My original concept for Jagged Doctrine was to be a cross between
Mortal and Deitiphobia.
Have you worked with any other "big names" in
the music industry?
Well, I am not sure what constitutes a big name ;) but some of the people
I have worked with are: Syd Rentz, the lead singer of Tooth and Nail band
Morella’s Forest. She sang lead vocals on a couple of tracks on Absolution
for me. I also recorded a couple of tracks in my studio and did 2 remixes
for their Japanese edition release of “Tiny Lights of Heaven”.
One of those remixes was done by Shawn (Morella’s Forest guitarist) and
myself under our side band name of Ti Mo.
Jagged Doctrine also did a remix for Null Factor. Wally Shaw of Deitiphobia
was going to produce a Jagged Doctrine CD but we never were able to work out
a schedule for that to happen.
Originally, I was going to have Travis Wyrick master the Absolution disc,
but that fell through and we had Ed Finkler of Cult of Jester master the
disc instead.
I hope to work with Midiboy in the future! -Ed: Ya, I hear Midiboy would
love to work with you too. :)
How did you get in with Ted Dekker to do the
Trilogy CD?
After reading Ted’s novel “When Heaven Weeps”, I wrote a song based off the
story. I had Syd Rentz come in and sing the track. Since I had borrowed
heavily from the novel in the lyrics, I felt I should at least attempt to
get Ted’s approval for us recording the track. I contacted him and he was
flattered that we had recorded a track based off one of his stories. Much
to my surprise, Ted actually liked the style of music Jagged Doctrine
records. During the back and forth discussions, we started talking about
the upcoming Trilogy. The idea of doing a soundtrack for the trilogy of
books came up and we jumped at the idea!
I think that your band did a great job capturing
each scene that Ted wrote
about in the story, but I really like how you give the minutes and seconds
of each song as they correlate to the story. Did you find yourself having
to cut songs or combine songs to make them all fit on the CD?
There were a few scenes that I wanted to do
that we never got to record.
The biggest scene I remember that I wanted to record was when Thomas was
sneaking through the Horde camp to rescue Rachel. I wanted to include that
scene because I thought the music would have been so different than anything
else on the soundtrack.
We didn’t have space issues on the CD though. The soundtrack is a little
over 60 minutes, so we could have put another 15 minutes on there. Our
biggest obstacle was time to complete the project.
The goal was to have the CD finished and printed and ready to ship by the
time the third book hit the store shelves. So, Ted was sending me
pre-releases of the books, I was reading them, creating scenes as they may
happen in a movie and then we would create the music to these imaginary
movie scenes. After recording the scenes, we had to properly mix it, master
it, do the artwork, and send it off to the CD duplication factory. So, we
had to finish recording the whole CD about 6 weeks before White even came
out. Because of the that, some planned tracks got left behind. Ideally, we
would have made the soundtrack a full 80 minutes. I’ve thought about going
back and adding that one scene of Thomas sneaking through the Horde camp and
having it as a free download online..so who knows?
Does Jagged Doctrine have any immediate plans
for the future?
After recording the Trilogy, Jagged Doctrine took a much needed break.
We have not recorded anything since September 04. I have recently started
writing again, and hope to do a yet unnamed themed EP. Also, I have not
decided if the project will carry the Jagged Doctrine name.
The Jagged Doctrine website should be updated soon to include info on the
project.
http://www.jaggeddoctrine.com
