OTEP is a nu metal band formed in 2000 in Los Angeles, California and has been screaming to the top ever since.

FEARS: What was the reason for starting a band?

OTEP SHAMAYA: The reason why I wanted to start a band was for art's sake and that's difficult for some people to accept and to understand and it's a rare commodity that you're not doing it for fame or notoriety or drugs or girls. All those are byproducts, but they shouldn't be the goal. Music should be the goal. Writing, as you know, is a very internal event. I wanted to do something that was external. I wanted to give these stories, these poems, and these ideas life. I wanted to get them sort of out of me and have this sort of collision of the universes where you have the internal and external universes colliding within the performance and so that's another reason why I wanted to play live music and not just be a studio musician. Which, of course, is still fun.

FEARS: What has the band, OTEP, contributed to the world of metal since its inception in 2000?

OTEP: I guess on the face of it, the obviousness of it would be the diversity. The makeup of the band itself is a little different than the rest of the other bands that seem to populate this genre that you speak of. I also hope we bring in a different set of influences and perhaps a bit more of a different slant on integrity in music. I think we're like an art band so we bring in different creative styles and hopefully we don't fall into, what I guess, is what the metal community knows is a pure stereotype of bullshit, but what the outside world kind of looks at is sort of the typical idea of someone in metal which is very like a satanic or drug user or that type of thing. We don't, we don't bring that to it at all.

{rokbox album=|OTEP| title=|Otep Takes the Stage in St. Petersburg, Florida-Photo by Christopher Mygrant |}images/stories/2007/MUSIC/OTEP/otep-takes-the-stage.jpg{/rokbox}

FEARS: What influences and/or events led have brought you to this point in time?

OTEP: I guess it depends on what you mean. Our inspirations span everything. Mine personally are from literature to visual artists. From literature, Sylvia Plath to Jean-Paul Sartre and musically everything from Slipknot to Radiohead to the Eastcoast underground hip-hop. And visually artist like Frieda Calo and Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. So those are the elements that seem to inspire and provoke me to do that with sound. But I think as a group we try to, um, we never limited our source for inspiration and we're primarily, I would say, that we look at ourselves as a fusion band more than anything else. Everything from grunge, which is one of my biggest influences, to metal to, you know, tribal rock like Tool.

FEARS: That's a broad range of music to like and listen to. Some hardcore music listeners (of all genres) limit themselves and put down the rest of the musical flavors that fill the air.

OTEP: I hate the mentality that a lot of people have in like, "Don't judge us (to the establishment). Don't point fingers at us just because of our hair or our t-shirts or the music we listen to or the movies we watch." But then at the same time, within their own community, they cannibalize themselves by saying, "Oh that's not real, that's not punk, that's not metal, that's not this, that's not that." Well, they're behaving just like, you know, the things they detest or seem that they rebel against. But yet, that's hypocrisy.

For me, any musician or artist or writer or anything, I mean the things that I've learned from people, and I'm still learning and still trying to do, is to be open to any source of inspiration. Otherwise, music sort of becomes mundane, obvious and boring. I don't ever want to...I don't like my life to be mundane, obvious or boring.

FEARS: If you ever find yourself headed down the mundane, obvious and boring avenues with your music, could you just shelf your music career?

OTEP: I'm not sure I could ever (pause) well I don't know. I don't live my life by any of those three. I don't let it get mundane, boring or obvious. If music ever becomes, um, something I don't want to do, I'll switch back to doing the things that I did before I did music.

FEARS: Which are?

OTEP: Writing and illustrating. Short stories, poems, which I do all the time anyway. I'm branching out into more of like journalism a bit. I've been offered some gigs that I'm not I'm gonna take, but I'm gonna try. As long as I'm doing something creative, I'll be happy. Music just seems to be the one thing that makes me the most happy right now. THE HAPPIEST!

FEARS: The band has had some line up changes throughout its history, what is it about the current line up that is making it work thus far?

OTEP: We've had musicians that decided it was time to move on with their lives or they wanted to do something else or try something else and that's okay. I think what makes this particular lineup special, to me, is that everyone seems to love playing music because they love playing music. They believe in the message. They believe in the music and they believe in what we are trying to accomplish.

FEARS: And that is to promote to the fans.......

OTEP: Surrrre and destroy the dominant paradigm and force a paradigm shift from this art that has been hijacked by image only and no substance to replacing it with substance - by force if necessary.

FEARS: How hard is it to continue to write song after song even with the many experiences encountered on the road and in your own life and still maintain substance? Have you ever hit the proverbial road-block and just couldn't think of anything?

OTEP: That's a real good question and you know, I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier which was intention and being open to all sources of inspiration and not limiting yourself and if your job is to be a writer then your job is to open yourself up to all different types of life experiences and all different sources of inspiration wherever they may be. If that is visual or film or if it's a, you know, a painting on a wall or if it's a song someone else sings or if it's going back and rediscovering and that's what we did on this new album (Ascension), I did anyway.

FEARS: Rediscovering? In what way?

OTEP: I went back and listened to the first album (Jihad) and then I tried to open up my old books and everything, the ones that I still have because a great majority of them were stolen from me right after we finished recording, but there were still a few and going back and revisiting those images and those elements and those emotions that provoked me to write that record and then um, and then revisiting all those inspirations that caused it too. Sometimes, as you go through life and life begins to pile up and you change or you meet new people or your life experiences change (pause) I'm no longer this poor kid on the street writing street poetry livin' on a dollar a day. But, that person still made me who I am today so it's important for me to always remember that.

FEARS: Never forget where you come from.

OTEP: That's right and revisited it (your past). Especially when you're trying to, you know, for me to stay fresh and to feel the motivation and feel that uniqueness and that originality again. So I did that with the second record too and revisited all those inspirations and re-listened to that record and really tried to recapture that energy of a first album of what it feels like to write your first album. How much detail you put in, how many challenges there are for you, and how important that message is to communicate to every single person. It's not only yourself that you're challenging, but it's the muses and it's being inspired by the people around you and trusting the people around you. So that was really, really tough.

FEARS: It's true when you say about recapturing the energy of a first project. Even though a band's or musician's first release may not be their best, it has that hungry feel to it and you know the artist(s) were really wanting to do their best so their best effort (at the time) was put forth.


OTEP: Yep and there's something there, an energy or something. And that's what I really wanted to recapture for this record (Ascension).

FEARS: Can you really "recapture" that vigor and energy?

OTEP: I think so and I think it's, for me anyway, it felt stronger because there was that energy that existed. That very primitive thing that existed on the first record, but I had no clue what I was doing. I mean I had no clue at what I was doing; I'd never recorded a record before. I had no clue. But now, at least I know, I have some sense of what the recording process will be like and I know what I expect of myself. So it was almost like when you're a child and you see a weapon and you look at it and see how amazing it is and you imagine what it would be like to use it and then growing up to be an adult and actually being able to fire off a round, you know, and that's what this record feels like to me.

FEARS: Like it, hate it, or love it, you are the focal point of the band. Is that a heavy weight to bear on your shoulders? You know, you have to wake up and an undesirable time of the day, but you know you have to because the promotion needs doing.

OTEP: You know it is in a way. I mean it is. I am sort of the nucleus and the chief protector of the faith. It's my band, I started it, I was hoping to find (pause) I didn't really ever have a lot of creative or artistic friends or people who understood writing and why writing is important. They were much more into partying or just, you know sports or something like that and so when I started the band I just thought naively that I was going to be able to out and find those people. You know, we were only a band for six months before we got signed. We had only done six shows before we got signed. Our eighth show as a band was Ozzfest 2001. I mean Sharron Osbourne saw us playing on the Sunset Strip up in L.A. and said, "You guys are playing Ozzfest." We were like, 'That's awesome, we don't have a label.' She said, "I don't care, make it happen."

FEARS: That's must have been very cool.

OTEP: It was a good week cause luckily we had some offers to do some showcases for some labels and it was like that next day we did a showcase for Capitol and as soon as we finished the showcase, they walked outside on their little Blackberry pagers and were sending messages to their headquarters that they needed to sign this band immediately. We went on Ozzfest and we got signed without a demo. We got signed purely on a live performance. We went on Ozzfest for the first, I don't know, two weeks or month of it or so without even an album. I mean we were just out there doing it. So everything we've ever gotten it through live performance.

{rokbox album=|OTEP| title=|Guitarist Evil J-Photo by Christopher Mygrant |}images/stories/2007/MUSIC/OTEP/guitarist-evil-j.jpg{/rokbox}

FEARS: That's a good thing. At least you all aren't just a studio band.

OTEP: Yeah. It works, sure, it worked. The thing is for me to be sort of the center point on which all the spokes in the wheel that is Otep, ah, reach out and touch everything around me, um, it's important that I lead by example and I don't mind that. For me this is no life style, this is my life and I don't mind it. It's not that difficult for me to live by the things that I believe in or that I speak about because they are who I am. The difficulty and the absolute pleasure now has been in finding other people that believe and so forth in these things and believe in them without being facetious or lying or just wanting to get wanting to get close to me or whatever, but now I think I have found a band that has musicians and the core of this band, for the most part, is always going to revolve around the philosophies that I set forth a long time ago. It's just nice to find people that believe in them and that those are the things that I've learned and researched and I'm just sort of the messenger on larger issues. It's not like I'm this great prophet or something, I'm speaking about art because of the things that I think are important about art and that other artists before me have spoken about.

FEARS: Are you happy with your latest project?

OTEP: Oh absolutely. I wouldn't put out a record I wasn't happy with. I was happy with House of Secret. I was just as happy with House of Secrets as I was with Sevas Tra. I'm even more proud of The Ascensions. I think it is a true offspring of its two parents, which are Sevas Tra and House of Secrets. I really wanted to have the power grooves and the strength of what was on Sevas Tra and all the different styles and things that were musical and also a little bit of the formula (pause) I kind of miss the verse chorus, verse bridge kind of chorus thing that I completely steered away from on House of Secrets. I was trying to reinvent my own understanding of how song composition could be fabricated. As an artist, I'm supposed to build on my past work and take the best of everything, fuse them and let it flower into something and I think that's what we've done on this record. I'm truly proud of it.

FEARS: Anything that you would change?

OTEP: If I could go back in, I would probably make it longer I think. We just ran out of time, but I intended to do it. Perhaps that will be the formation of the next record which will be one piece. It will be one album. I mean there'll still be songs and stuff, but I want to be able to fuse it into one large piece of music.

FEARS: How would you describe your live performances?

OTEP: Our live shows are basically just one composition with like twenty different sequences in it.
Fears: If you could go back in time, would there be anything you would like to learn or do to better prepare you for your chosen profession or just to give you more insight?

OTEP: I wish my parents would have let me take piano lessons or even art lessons. All I ever learned about art, other than my own innate hunger for it and, you know, sort of craving to create, draw or write came from public schooling and home schooling. I wish I would have learned piano. I wish I would have learned the guitar. I sort of have a natural instinct for music, so I'm able to understand it, but luckily I've been blessed to have been around some really good people that I could learn from. When I decided that music was what I was going to try to accomplish, um, I buried my head into understanding what different types of music were and what different types of riffs were and usually let the songs build themselves.

FEARS: That provokes a question that I always have in the back of my mind, how do musicians know when to add this riff here and that drumbeat there?

OTEP: It's all about the dynamics. It's like writing a good story. It's the same principles. For me, it's the same principles. You know, you want a good intro and you want a good story. You want crescendos, you want climaxes, and then you want resolution. With any plays, operas, performances, stories, films, music songs, albums, you want to feel that ride and you want to feel that journey. At least I do.

FEARS: That's a good way to describe it; "a ride" and I guess that is what you are on.

OTEP: Absolutely and so one of the things that I found, which was the biggest difference I think between a literary mind and a musical mind was how easy it is for them to just sew different pieces together without really worrying about if they could be better or if this really works. I always imagined composers sitting at their piano ripping up pages, which is what I do when I'm sitting there reading something that I've written and I hate it and I've ripped it up and thrown it on the floor or I've drawn something that just didn't worked and I started over, started over and started over.

FEARS: What is your song writing approach?

OTEP: One of my approaches with music is that, uh, some of the most satisfying moments have been that one note or that one part that makes for me, that's it. Or it's like that one word that you've been missing. That perfect metaphor. That perfect piece that solves the puzzle.

FEARS: Describe your career thus far.

OTEP: It's been a really marvelous journey. I'm still learning. I hope I never master it. I hope I'm always a hungry apprentice that continues to grow.

FEARS: What's in store for the future? DVDs, etc.

OTEP: That's the thing, we've had such shitty management and shitty agents that we've only had one DVD, which was basically just extended coverage of what was on our enhanced CD of the first record. It was so stupid. So hopefully that's what's coming next. An actual DVD that covers what we do live and we do within the studio and that type of thing.

FEARS: Hell that could be another avenue for you to go down. Directing and what not.

OTEP: Yeah man. Absolutely. Cause I'm involved with the album art, most of the packaging and even our videos. So I'm involved with all of that and the next thing that would be nice to put together a DVD. That would be great. A mini film! Yeah! There we go! That's right, a road film. That would be excellent.

FEARS: I must say it has been a pleasure speaking with you. You have provided great insight into not only your professional world, but your personal world as well. Thank you very much

OTEP: My pleasure. Thank you.

OFFICIAL OTEP WEBSITE:
http://www.otep.com/

OFFICIAL OTEP MYSPACE:
http://www.myspace.com/otep

OFFICIAL OTEP FAN GROUP:
http://groups.myspace.com/OTEPELITEGUARD

OFFICIAL OTEP FACEBOOK:
http://www.facebook.com

OFFICIAL OTEP BEBO:
http://OTEP-band.bebo.com

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