Yob fans are thrilled about the re-release of the beloved record Atma, but coming out with the new record wasn’t a snap decision for the band. It was years in the making, and there is care and attention in every aspect of the special edition put out by Relapse. we chatted with Mike Scheidt about the decision to put out the album again and what they’ve been up to.
What was the inspiration behind re-releasing the album? I’ve read that you wanted to take more care and polish it up, but what was the thought process like for putting it out?
Well, I mean, the actual idea probably began maybe four years ago. We wished we could revisit the record and maybe remix it, because when we first recorded the ideas, we wanted something kind of rough, and we wanted the recording to feel raw and kind of rough, kind of like Sleep’s Holy Mountain, where it’s rough around the edges but the music really emergences from it. We got the recording that we wanted, but we feel like we had really grown in sound and this was sounding very rough, especially compared to our other records. The panning on the original mix is also a little strange.
But I was hesitant because when I hear bands revisit old materials, sometimes it is really great and sometimes it isn’t. The record was already loved by enough people that it made me nervous to mess with it, and I didn’t want to take away something that people loved. But we talked about it periodically, and then once the pandemic came and we cancelled tours and had more time, we started to think about this in more detail, and I kind of decided to open my heart to it and get out of the way and let it happen. We make decisions all three of us, and if one of us is really hesitant about something, we either don’t do it, or we put it on the back burner and keep talking about it. So finally, with all three of us on board, we enlisted Billy Barnett of Gung Ho Studio, who has been a part of every one of our recordings since 2004 in one way or another.
We told him our goals and had a really in-depth conversation about the original mix and what works and what doesn’t, and what we didn’t want to lose. So from there, Billy paid especially close attention to guitar tone and the overall mix of instruments in relation to each other, and he filled out the drum sounds. And it was kind of a miracle that Jeff Olson, who recorded that record in his studio, Dogwood Recordings, he hadn’t been in the studio for seven or eight years, yet he miraculously still had a hard drive with all the tracks. And so he brought ti to Billy, and from there, because originally that all went to tape and I had the reels, we also used the original tracks to fill out the drum sounds. Once he had something to present to us, it was astonishingly close to what we had in mind.
People know all these songs already, and it was never a matter of the material; It was about the production. And so now we have something that is panned left and right with good volume and wide, powerful drums. All the tones and everything are in their place. We were very adamant about not fixing anything, so any kind of imperfections or texture from the original is there in the remix. We weren’t trying to rewrite history; We’re just trying to better reveal what was there. And as a result, I sat there with headphones and I rediscovered the album. For me, it was a huge revelation that really made me rethink the music These are songs that are requested on every tour, always. People know these songs.
How has the reception been to the rerelease so far?
I had less trepidation about it knowing that the old version of the album is still available, so I felt like there are lots of copies out there in the world, whether it be vinyl or CD, so it’s not like some rarified thing. People don’t always go out of your way to tell you good things, even in the internet age, but we do have really nice fans. I think overwhelmingly the response has been good, and it seems to me that we did something a lot of people wanted—Either they consciously wanted it or they didn’t realize they wanted it until they heard the difference.
You know, I had less trepidation about it knowing that the other album was available. And so I felt more like in there’s lots of copies of that out there in the world, whether it be on vinyl or CD. So I mean, it’s not like some rarefied thing. Exactly. But But I would say I mean, people don’t always go out of their way to tell you that hey, something gets even in the internet age. But I mean, we just have really nice fans. Which is, you know, thank you for that. We love it. But, but um I think overwhelmingly the response has been good to over the top grade nine. And it seems to me like we did something that a lot of people wanted, and either they consciously knew it or they didn’t know it until they heard the difference.
Catch Yob at shows this summer, including Fire in The Mountains, and check out the re-release here.
Featured image courtesy of Yob
