Justin Bender is a special guy. He is the former guitarist for metal band Into Eternity, and current lead guitarist for progressive metal stalwarts Third Ion. Their latest release Biolith is a juggernaut of a record that changes tempos and time signatures at break neck speed. He recently sat down with Slickster for a lengthy, and well-spoken, interview that spans Third Ion, a fresh perspective on his native Canada, and the band’s love of video game culture.
Check it out below:
On how Third Ion formed:
“Me and the drummer, Aaron Edgar, formed the band. We had met in 2010 randomly at a show. I was doing sound and he was filling in with a band on tour, and we got chatting about metal drummers. I think I was wearing a Death shirt and he was asking me, do I like Richard Christy, or Gene Hoglan, or Sean Reinert, and I remember being surprised that this guy playing with this band that I was doing sound for knew who these guys were. And then we just started talking, and he’s a huge geek like me, a gear collector. He has an insane collection of Sonar snare drums and some studio gear, and he’s got a really cool setup at his place, and we just got along and kept in touch. It’s one of those things where I met this guy and thought ‘he’s gonna be important’, so you hold on to that. I just thought he was a really killer dude.”
“It took a few years. I was still playing in Into Eternity and it only took a few months to say “shit” I have to do something with this guy, so we kicked around the idea to start this and, it only took 4 years, and I finally said, ‘why don’t I just come to Winnipeg’, I have a few riff ideas and lets maybe write something new, work on some new ideas and flesh them out, and we did, and pretty much from that first session it ignited into a full blown project. We Got Mike Young on board and he is in Vancouver, which is way far away from us, but we figured we would make it work. He was totally into it too, Mike is a guy that does a lot of session work, and a hired gun a lot of the time playing with all kinds of bands, so I figured it would be a hired gun kind of thing where I would pay him to be on the album, but he loved the project and wanted to be involved, he has become a major contributor. We have gone through a number of singers, but the core has always been Mike, Aaron, and I. From there it kind of snowballed into something, and within two years we had two records out. We immediately got obsessed with it when we started.”
On how vocalist Dave Padden from Annihilator joined the band:
“Dave Padden and Mike are both from Vancouver, and played in some projects together. Dave was in Mike’s old and Terror Syndrome and he knew Dave and thought he would fit in… and he’s a great singer. Annihilator credit aside, we had a few singers try out, we had Dave go over to Mike’s and record a demo from the first album to send to us, because he clearly is good at what he does, but Annihilator is so different than what we are doing, that I needed to hear how he would sound. And it’s one of those things where it was so immediate, there were a couple of guys that auditioned that were cool, and we could see where they were going and it wasn’t bad, but Dave 100% knocked it out of the park. He was the clear choice the second we heard him.
And he’s a huge nerd, which is kind of a thing.”
On the definition of being a huge nerd…which is kind of a thing:
“My main jam is Star Trek, Mike is a big trekkie, and Dave is definitely. Aaron is the only one not big on the trek world, he likes Star Wars, but he’s huge into video game nerd, most out of all of us. We all have a bit in common in the nerd realm, those guys are really big Simpson’s geeks and could quote the show all day, and I’m usually in the dark, even though I’ve seen a lot of them. I just have never been obsessed like those guys. Everybody has their thing, Aaron and I will, after a writing session, chill out and watch Cosmos, or some sort of science documentary.”
On writing such extreme tempo changes with mathematical precision:
“Sometimes Aaron will light up, and he will lay out the process in a mathematic equation, and I just look at him and say, ‘Can you explain this in a musical way where I can understand it?’ And usually he can. Into Eternity had odd time signatures, but not really polyrhythms. Into Eternity would have a 7/8 into a 9/8, and that I can do til the cows come home, but when it starts getting into the rhythmic layers over top of each other, quintuplets and sextuplets and other stuff… that stuff is really hard for a guitar player, at least for me to internalize. Sometimes Aaron would throw stuff at me and he would have to come up with a different rhythmic trick for me to riff over what his idea is so that it would make sense to me he would say: ‘don’t even worry about what I am doing technically, if you just play on ‘this note’ and ‘this note’, rhythmically it will line up and it will sound really cool.’”
“It’s not like that all the time, but every now and then I have to ask Aaron for more time to prepare. But a lot of the sharp changes are an advantage of the way we are able to write. We’re all studio guys we do a lot of Pro Tools for a living, and Aaron has a really great setup for session work from home, so he has a good multitrack setup for his drums, so we get really good drum sounds as we are writing the parts. If we want to, we can record the final drum parts because he has all this great gear. So, there is a lot of stuff on the record that is the first take Aaron worked on. Sometimes he will lay something down and that’s it, moving on… Sometimes we don’t always have the most organic way of recording, but it helps us get there quickly which I find having the technology to do that, being able to piece parts together, it allows you to capture magic in the writing space. The technology also allows us to take two different tempos and time signatures and put them together. Essentially you can piece the songs together like that.
The trick is you have to figure out how to play them live.”
On the trick to playing those songs live:
“You honestly just have to be aware of how fucked up its gonna be, and ask yourself ‘can I do this?’ We are working on this stuff, I will sit there and play riffs and play a part, even if I’m kind of shitty at it, I at least know that it will work. We don’t get together as a band very often cause we all live so far apart, so when we know we are going to get together, we just sit and shed the material on our own, so when we finally do get together we have everything good to go. I think there are only one or two riffs that really stress me out where I’m going, ‘maybe I can’t do this’, but you just practice it enough it eventually comes, and you play it enough that it becomes easy and think: ‘maybe we can make it crazier on the next record.’”
On 80’s video game overtones and the character on the album cover:
“There is a character on the record that wraps the album packaging. We have a bit of story about him on the first record, and then Biolith is a 10 minute thing, fleshing it out a little more. We are hoping to write a full record about the character. I imagine that we will do more electronic music on that record. We haven’t started writing that record yet. We have quite a bit of material written for the next record, that the concept thing might be there for the 4th record. We are going to do the third album differently than the first two, just because of scheduling. We would like to block out a few weeks, but we’ll see when we can do that. I imagine when we write out that whole story, along with the character, we will have a bit more of that style, because he’s very video game influenced and where we created him from, it’s a huge homage to Mega-Man, and Metroid, and a lot of other things we are into from the old 80’s Nintendo.”
On being from Canada and how the country has influenced the band’s style:
“A guy that has always been supportive of Into Eternity and everything that I have been doing is this guy from New York, and he always comments on how Canadian bands seem to merge elements of American metal and European metal more naturally and seamlessly than a lot of other bands from other places. I never really noticed until he pointed it out. It could just be that Canada as a general rule is a huge melting pot. We have people from all over, and we take pride in it. I’ve always considered it a good thing. I go out and I go to the bank or deal with somebody, and there are all kinds of different cultures doing all kinds of different jobs here and I think that there are a lot of countries that are in really shitty states, there is a lot of war going on, and so if they feel like Canada is a good place to come and it’s a safe haven, I think that’s awesome. So maybe that has something to do with it. I remember thinking as a kid that Canada doesn’t really have a cultural identity when in reality, it’s cultural identity is a mixture of a bunch of different cultural identities, so that creates its own identity in the merging of everything. That might be how we approach music, cause we get influences from all over and put them all together.”
On skewed perceptions of Canada, and the aboriginal population:
“One of the things about this part of the world I guarantee that no one understands, unless you grow up here, is that there is a large indigenous population in Canada that occupied this land before, for thousands of years. In America, the Europeans pretty much wiped that culture out, and it seems that there isn’t much of an indigenous population left, and in Canada there are a lot. And there are a lot of reserves, I don’t know what other people think of when they hear reserves, but here they are like little towns with chiefs and councils, and they operate fairly autonomously, but the thing is, there has been a lot of shit that the Canadian government has done to them and there is a lot of bad blood. Our people have done some shit to the aboriginal population, and I can understand where a lot of their hatred comes from and I try to sit back and reflect and understand their perspective. Americans have a lot of things in the news about how cops treat African Americans and that is pretty real here in Canada with the Native population and, being a white guy, I can only really guess, but I think it’s pretty common for an indigenous person to walk into a store and being suspected of shoplifting almost immediately, that sort of thing is a lot more prevalent, and it’s really shitty. So that is something that might shatter someone’s perception of Canada being this happy and polite place. But while everyone is going around being super polite they often have an in-born mistrust with aboriginal people, and it’s really unfortunate.”
“Hopefully there is something that we can do in our generation to make amends. In America there are so many people that are the anti-immigration people and they are so afraid of anybody coming to America, and it’s like, what the hell are you? Your only a couple of generations American. You came and obliterated the population, and maybe you’re afraid of someone coming to do that to you, I suppose because you’ve seen it first hand? It’s really weird.”
On the positives of the Canadian government pushing art funding:
“That’s something that we have that is really great. The thing is that we are a tiny population spread out over a huge land mass, so gigging and touring is hard. And apparently the prices just went up. Getting into the states is really expensive and the wait times are way longer, and its total bullshit. That’s one of the reasons you don’t get a lot of the Canadian influence down there that you might like, because it really can be incredible to get a Visa, and it has become preventative, otherwise we would get down there and play shows. In the reverse case, American bands that come up here, if they are playing at a place that’s Labor Market Opinion exempt, (A Labor Market Opinion, or LMO, is a document the Canadian government issues to employers wishing to hire foreign workers), like an event center that is only open for the show to happen, those types of things don’t need a Labor Market Opinion and the bands can basically come and go as they please to the venue. And if the place does need a Labor Market Opinion, there is a one-time fee and they can play anywhere all across the country. The Harper government decided to up all those fees and make it a per venue fee instead of a one-time fee, and everyone lost their shit and were losing money, and they ended up repealing it. But there have been a lot of petitions going around, so maybe someone will listen to us. It’s already hard enough to get down there, so we’ll see.”
Musician / Band that has influenced your guitar playing and sound?
“Dream Theater, Death, Opeth is one of my favorite bands. Death has been a big influence; I’m a lifelong Metallica fan… Talk about a band that polarizes a country, there are so many lovers and haters on both sides, but they were my gateway for metal and so I’ve always held onto that, and have forgiven them for all the dumb shit they’ve done. I think Load is a fantastic record, James Hetfield’s vocals on Load are amazing, and I think the new one, Hardwired…To Self-Destruct is great, it makes me very happy.”
What is one record that you couldn’t live without?
“I think Scenes from a Memory by Dream Theater is a record that I would listen to nonstop if I only had one album. That’s a hard question, but if I had to, that would be it.”
First concert you ever went to?
“I saw Smashing Pumpkins when I was 13 and I liked it, but the next year I saw Metallica and that changed everything for me. I saw them on the Load tour and I had …And Justice For All and the Black Album before that, but to me I didn’t even really know the difference that much. I hadn’t grown up with it, so I didn’t get the sense of betrayal that everyone else had. Then I saw them on that tour and it blew my mind and it cemented me as a metal-head from that point on.”
What’s next for Third Ion?
“It’s one of those things where we’re not itching to get back on the road, but we really love it. I personally would love to play more shows but a lot of it is location. There is a fair amount of logistics that has to take place with flights and such. But I also think that as long as we put out good music, someone will come our way, we’ve had a few close ones that have asked, but there is politics involved so you lose out to somebody else, and that’s fine, we’re happy doing what we’re doing and we do get a lot of people from the states that do want to see us, but we are definitely not saying no, and it will definitely happen at some point.”
Check out the bands website here: http://www.thirdion.com/
Check out their ridiculous song “Illogical” below.
