By Greg Pratt

Karl Sanders must be one of the nicest dudes in death metal. Chatting with him on the phone about his excellent new solo disc, Saurian Exorcisms, is, more or less, the same as chatting with a friendly charity canvasser. He’s funny, he’s laughing, he’s being silly… what the shit? This can’t be the bad-ass behind all those bone-crushingly heavy Nile albums, can it? Well, when your musical personality is as split as this guy’s is (obscenely heavy technical death metal vs. ambient quasi-instrumental Egyptian soundscapes), I guess it makes sense.

Anyway, once past my initial confusion that Sanders isn’t just grunting into the phone at me or rattling off Egyptian folklore, I ask how he feels to have the new solo disc, his second, laid to rest and ready for public consumption.

“I’m just happy to be able to share some really personal music with whoever wants to listen,” he says. “I think that’s a beautiful thing.”

And it strikes me as odd: much like his death metal career, I wouldn’t consider the music found on his solo albums (ambient, hypnotic, definitely Egypt-influenced, as always, and somewhere between embracing traditional sounds and embracing modern sounds) to be personal. Sure, all music is personal to the creator, but all this advanced Egyptology stuff reads more like a textbook than a diary to me. Uh, and I don’t mean that in a bad way.

“Okay, cool,” Sanders laughs. “It’s just really music I make in my spare time for fun and relaxation. It’s not part of the corporate engine of deadlines and fitting demographics and it has to be this or has to be that. It doesn’t have to be anything other than what I feel like putting on there. That’s really relaxing and refreshing to me. Before I made the decision to make it a public project it was just stuff I recorded for fun and it amused me and helped me unwind. Some people go bowling; not me, I play guitar and write music. That’s what I do.”

One noticeable thing about the disc is although there is a vocalist (Mike Brezeale; Sanders handles all the instrumentation), there isn’t much in the way of vocals. Really, the disc ends and you’re left wondering if there were any vocals on there or not. Thing is, there is… but there isn’t.

“There’s no real lyrics or actual real vocals on there; there’s vocals doing weird stuff and vocals doing chants or groans or screams or humming melodies but not any traditional lyrics like you’d find in normal songs,” says Sanders. “That was one of the parameters that me and Mike came up with, that we should do something that no one’s really done or really worn out yet, find an approach that’s completely different. And we laughed and said, ‘Yeah, an approach that gets us fucking crucified in magazine reviews’ (laughs)”

This disc (which most likely will not get Sanders and Brezeale crucified on bravewords.com), and all of Sanders’ solo work, acts as a release from the pressures of playing in a band as popular as Nile. Sanders says he can spend as much time as he wants recording the discs in his home studio; on the new one he plays all the percussion even though, by his own admission, he’s no drummer.

“With Nile, there are definitely deadlines and people crunching down on you and huge amounts of money being spent,” he says. “That’s a high-pressure way of working. It’s the complete opposite to this. For me this is a way to relax and have fun and just make some music that I like. I’m not saying I don’t like Nile - I love Nile. But this is a pressure valve, you might say.”

Sanders—who released his first solo album, Saurian Meditation, in 2004—says there was no grand epiphany, no one big moment when he realized he had to step outside of the realm of death metal to create all the art he had to create. Rather, it built up over time, over tours.

“When you tour in a death metal band and you’re playing on a death metal tour with a death metal package that means you’re getting four or five bands a day, at least, plus soundchecks… that’s how much death metal you’re subjecting yourself to every single day. A six-week block at a time of nothing but at least five hours of death metal a day. Now as much as I love death metal and am a metal lifer—I made metal my fucking life and have been living it like that for a long fucking time—and I fly the flag of death metal, even I need a motherfuckin’ fuckin’ sanity break.”

And Sanders is motherfuckin’ fuckin’ right about that: all heavy all the time just leads to sensory overload and metal becoming meaningless. You need some mellowness to counter the heaviness; to make it heavy.

“Stuff to me sounds heavier when you’re not bombarded with heaviness all the time,” he says. “There’s no contrast. When you’re arranging orchestra-type things, if you want something to sound big, there has to be something small that you also hear next to the big thing, that gives your ear and your brain a little bit of perspective. It’s the same thing with painting, too. If you’re painting a picture and you want to have it look big, something in the picture has to give your mind a reference point to make the big big. So to me, that translates if you want to enjoy some heavy things you have to have contrast so it gives meaning and depth to life-crushing heaviness.”

With his solo material being nowhere near as heavy as his day job, one wonders if it attracts mainly metal fans or if it reaches outside of the world of metal. Turns out, it gets out there to a lot more than just death metal folks.

“A lot of people that like my side-project say stuff to me like, ‘Nile’s just too heavy; I can’t take the vocals and blasting drums, but I love what your side-project’s doing.’ Conversely, there are people who see my name and this project and give it a listen and were expecting some huge Cannibal Corpse-like heaviness and it’s not on there and those people go, ‘What the fuck?’ If I like it, I’m sure there are other people who will appreciate it too. I’m not so much worried about whether death metal fans will like it or not. I know since I’m a death metal fan and I like it that it’s going to resonate with some other folks too.”

It’s pretty cool to see the disc being released on The End, something Sanders couldn’t be happier about. He finished off the album before he knew who was going to release it, shopped around for a label and there you have it, simple as that.

“We offered it to Nuclear Blast and Relapse, who had done my first solo project, and we also offered it to The End, and The End gave us by far the best possible deal and it really seemed like they were interested in working with us. I love just about everything The End puts out, really interesting, eclectic music, fun, challenging and different. So to be part of The End, that’s fucking cool man, I’m really happy about that.”

And a Nile update to end things off…

“At the moment, we’re working on songs for the next Nile album. George (Kollias, drums) is going to fly in at the end of this month, we’re going to do about six weeks of rehearsals, then we start recording in June down with Erik Rutan. Then we’ll come back to Greenville, South Carolina, work here until we finish everything else, then we’re going to mix up in Chicago with Neil Kernon. We hope to have the album out in October or November. To my ears, there’s a lot of different arrangement ideas, a lot of new instrumentation for us, a lot of guitar playing squeezed in there. I think some of the stuff on there is gonna really make people go, ‘Wow, I didn’t expect him to do that.’ I’m really excited about it; the demos we’ve done so far have been really exciting for us.”