Nile (band)

"This comes from a guitar lesson I had with (legendary shredder) Rusty Cooley where we were dissecting two concepts. The first one would be ‘Nephren-ka’; during the years that we were doing the early Nile songs, there was no scale that actually fit those songs, so we had to make what’s called a synthetic scale, which is basically it’s not a scale that exists, but you need one, so you make it up that’s specific to those purposes. So a lot of those songs on that album – Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka – use the ‘Nephren-ka’ scale. Because we made it up, necessity is a mother of invention, the ‘Nephren-ka’ scale is a six-note scale. It’s not seven. It’s only got six notes. And it’s kind of like a Locrian mode with no sixth degree. The other part of this story, the ‘Pentagrammathion’ part, is yet another lesson I had with Rusty Cooley, where if you take any five-note scale, through the magic of how those notes are laid out, if you take out any one of those notes, maybe it’s this Note, maybe it’s this note, maybe it’s this note. You’re left with a four-note scale, which just happens to be a quartal minor, 11th chord, no matter which one of these notes you take out, which is kind of fascinating. So if you’re left with this four-note chord, if you add back in a fifth note, and it doesn’t have to be the same note that you took out, it could be a different note. Now we got five notes again, but depending on which note you stick back in there, you get an entirely different mode or tonality and a different set of chords that you can derive from this new artificial five-note mode. This is the pentagrammathion, because there are so many possibilities that it’s kind of like having a dial that’s got five points, and you can spin it around and wherever you spin it and add something random in, you get something new. That concept of yeah, it just changes every time. So ‘The Pentagrammathion Of Nephren-ka’ is where we took the ‘Nephren-ka’ scale and put it inside this pentagram wheel and spun it around and see what chords and tonalities and melodies are derived from, wherever the five-pointed dial ended up."

"If we were using the music of the local area here, it would sound nothing like a Nile album. In a way it’s a form of escapism. There are a lot of Eastern modalities and tonalities adapted into the guitar playing, but it’s not purely authentic because it can’t be. In the same way that the soundtrack for a Mummy movie or whatever is not all ancient stuff from 5000 years ago, it’s music that puts you in that mindset, which is a different thing. Are you scoring a Hollywood movie, or being a musical preservation society? We’re a metal band, so we lean towards the ‘Hollywood making a horrific Ancient Egypt movie’ [approach]."

"Every song that gets written is filtered through our own lens and our life experiences. [...] You can’t help it that whatever glasses you’re wearing are going to filter how you look at history."