Behind the Sun

What's the meaning behind the band's name?
Gad: The name comes to represent some kind of darkness, mystique, uncharted territories, things that hide behind what we can grasp and settle with our human logic. We also think there are infinite possibilities behind the sun

Aaron: The band's name means something metaphysical, that can't be reached but only imagined. Behind the Sun is a place that you can't get to, its beyond normal experiences and on the other side of reality. Our sound is a blend of earth, grunge sounds and progressive timings and touches from a more atmospheric place and Behind the Sun is where everything comes together in the music.

How the band started??
Gad:Aaron (guitar and vocals) and Saar (drums) started the band. They used to meet and jam on riffs and lyrics Aaron wrote and brought with him. I (Gad - lead vocals) was invited to join the jam and try some singing. At first we used to jam on some Doors, Zeppelin and Pearl Jam tunes (we used to play in the basement of Saar's village community center, but pretty fast that changed to working on the original materials. Fast forward a few years and a few personal changes in the band, we still enjoy playing together, whether in a rehearsal room, a live show or any other platform.

What's the message to transmit with your music??
Aaron: Our songs deal with the everyday reality of living in the middle east, which is one of the world's most exotic and combustible places. This is the place where east is meeting west every day and you have a combination of cultures and philosophies which sometimes results in beauty and sometimes results in tragedy. Our music and lyrics are trying to reflect the harsh realities and bitterness about corruption and the violence and incitement which is going on but they are also reflecting hopes and positive thinking that things can get better. We've got some songs like "The Professionals" which are about religious fanatics trying to get people to fight wars for them, and we also have some songs like "Running Water" and "Still" which are more personal and are about trying to draw strength and keep going and make your life better.

Gad: It's important for me to pass a positive, optimistic message to whoever is listening to our music, even if most of our songs are pretty bleak and foreboding. It's important to say that even when we write about the corrupted and negative sides of life, we only do it to raise awareness and provoke some thoughts in the listeners head.

What's your method at the time of writting a song??
Aaron: In the past we used to get quite bogged down in our songwriting and we would work and work and work on one song until we had ironed out every last detail and tried it 18 different ways. For example, I wrote three sets of lyrics for the verses of "the professionals" before I got to something which I thought was really strong.
We're now writing songs for our second album and we've been working with a brand new method of writing songs which our bass player Dan Levy came up with. He calls it "Dylanology". We start out with some riffs or ideas for a song and some lyrics and we bring it to the full band right away, without waiting around to completely plan out the intro or outros or even the structure of the song in terms of where the verses and chorus are and how many and where, etc. Instead we all get together at rehearsals and run through the main parts of song with all 5 musicians and try and get a really rough direction and feel of where the song is taking us. I think Dan got the idea by watching some films about how Dylan made his "Bringing it all back home" album. Once we get a verse and chorus down, we work on a really rough arrangement and run through the song a few times to get it on tape. Then, so we don't get bogged down in the little details for too long, we move onto the next song. The idea is that instead of completely arranging one new song every month or so, and getting to the recording of the album with some songs which are already more than a year old and don't feel fresh to us --- we want to do the final arrangements of all the new songs right before we go into record. That way, we hope all the songs that will go into the album will share a feeling that they all came out of the same moment in time when we came together to make a single unified piece of an album, instead of say 12 different songs which came from 12 different places in time. So when the next album comes out in 2011 you can listen to it and see if we were right or if we were crazy!

Which is your music influences??
Aaron: Sometimes you have a band where everybody grew up listening to punk, or country or speed metal, and they all went to the same concerts and have the same generational memories. Our band is quite different, Saar and Yoram are very much into heavy metal and Gad is a massive classic rock fan and record collector and was really influenced by living in Seattle during the grunge era. Dan is listening to everything from Weather Report to Les Claypool to King Crimson to Leonard Cohen and myself(Aaron): while also being a fan of metal and progressive rock, I'm a massive fan of jam bands like the Grateful Dead and Phish. So the Behind the Sun sound and music is a combination of all of these influences --- you can have a really heavy and driving rhythm section coming from the drums and bass and yet the lyrics are going to be very down to earth and personal and the guitars and going to swirl around and burn and crackle like they came out of a tube amp at Winterland in 1975. The bass on our album goes all the way from 1001 Arabian nights on "Strong Wind" to black metal thunder on "Fifteenth Dawn". I can tell you that we have slowly infected each other with our musical favorites and lately we've all been listening to Mastodon, Opeth, Tool, Queens of the Stone Age and Government Mule.

What plans do you guys have for the future??
Aaron: Next week (September 28th, 2010) we are gonna be playing the biggest show of our lives when we open up the Ozzfest Tel Aviv in front of tens of thousands of Israeli metal fans. We are going to be playing before Soulfly, Korn and Ozzy Osbourne himself and its a huge, huge, massive honor. The rest of the year we are going to keep writing and arranging new songs for our second album which we hope to record in 2011. We've got about 8 songs worked up so far and another 10 or so which are in the early guitar & vocal demo phase which the band will work up soon. Its a wide range of lyrical subjects going all the way from 13th century Icelandic gang warfare to a song about Brian Wilson to a song about some really trippy experiences Gad had deep in the desert while he was away on reserve duty guarding the border with Jordan. Were gonna keep writing until we get about 20-30 songs in the can and then figure out which songs are going to work the best together and give us a really strong and unified album in sound and direction.

Which has been the funniest prank you guys have been or took part while on tour or after a show??
Aaron:I can't really answer that question without exposing myself to legal action but let's just say it involved whipped cream, stage monitors and monogrammed towels.
 

If you guys were stranded in the middle of nowhere after a show or while on tour. The help is 65 miles away from where you guys are, ¿Who would you guys send to look for help? And if while the rest wait, there's no food and the only way to feed yourself is by eating each other, ¿Who would you eat first?
Gad:  Thank you for this question, I've always wanted to address the cannibalism issue in this band!
I'd send Saar to look for help because I'd think the rest of the band would want to have me for lunch ("there's more here if you want an extra slice" "that's ok, save some for later" "oh believe me, there's enough for a week or so...") and Saar, with his family originally from Argentina, would devour his share in one big bite :-)
 

Aaron:  I think we would eat Dan first because he's the youngest and I think that with a little hot sauce we could tell ourselves its just a large chicken. Who would I send for help? I'm a big believer in "If you want something done right, do it yourself".

Which country you guys would love to play?
Aaron: There are a lot of places we would love to play where the kind of heavy music we make is really appreciated and there are a lot of fans of progressive music and places where our favorite bands came out of. Just to name a few I would say the USA, England, Sweden, Hungary, Japan, Denmark, Brazil, Holland, Mexico. We are looking for some festivals to play outside of Israel and I hope that when we tour for the next album we can get to some of the places on this list.

With which bands you guys would love to share stage??

Aaron: Our all time favorite heroes have got to be: Pearl Jam, Opeth, Dream Theater, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, The Who ... even sharing an order of french fries with these bands would be a huge deal.

Are you guys OK, with the direction the band is going actually?
Gad: I personally am very pleased with the accomplishments this band has made in the last 18 months, starting a couple of months prior to the release of our album (June 2009). We've played a lot of shows here in Israel, made a good fan-base, gotten some great album reviews from around the world and now made it to the Ozzfest Tel Aviv line-up. I'm confident that if we continue to strive towards bigger goals and dreams, we can eventually make them into reality - with hard work and a lot of persistence.

Check out more from this band by going to http://behindthesun.bandcamp.com