There’s an infectiously lyrical quality to Aaron Marshall’s playing on Memory Palace, the latest album from the guitarist’s Toronto-based prog-strumental outfit, Intervals.
Songs like Nootropics sport undeniably serotonin-surged melodies that get stuck in your head for days – all the more wondrous when you consider how those hooks come framed within neon blurs of selective picking and quizzically complex, tech-chugged syncopation.
In a recent making-of documentary around the album, bassist Jacob Umansky deadpans, “There’s a lot of notes, and it’s easy to miss them.” Marshall likewise admits that the group’s own memory palaces sometimes come crumbling down onstage.
“We’re certainly human, and I think it’s cool to show that we are indeed playing the music in real time; that reminds the audience that they’re not listening to a backing track,” he says jovially of the odd onstage flub. Those fly by quick enough, though, amid the flurry of twists within each Intervals piece. “Do I want a flawless performance every night? Absolutely! Do you get one? Don’t hold me to it… but we try.”
Since 2011, Intervals have somewhat existed as a virtuosic outgrowth of Marshall’s interest in “memory and balance” – the technique and muscle memory guitarists accrue are proof to him that “humans are pretty impressive.”
That adaptability is referenced right on the new record’s Mnemonic Device, its title alluding to tricks Marshall uses to retain complex sequences. For this one, he visualized and channeled the Hamsa – a divine symbol of a hand with an eyeball in its palm – to finger through a frantic rolling-fives motif.
Though clearly hard-wired for complexity, Marshall also knows it’s sometimes just as important to deprogram in order to stay the course. “I’ll modify things to make them easier on me live,” he says. “If that means I’ve got to hybrid-pick the line rather than fully alternate-pick it, no harm no foul. You’ve got to say it with your chest. Don’t play it in a way that scares you. Do it in a way that makes you feel confident.”
Another musician confidently crushing Intervals songs these days is Wolfgang Van Halen, the Mammoth WVH leader who’d previously praised Intervals’ 2020 full-length, Circadian, in the pages of Guitar World. When the two groups finally toured together this past spring, Wolfie couldn’t wait to work through songs with Marshall & Co.
“He knows more Intervals songs at any given moment than I do – on guitar and drums,” Marshall says of a spicy pre-show jam with WVH. “He was busting out licks from Earthing, which is the final track on Circadian. We’ve never played that song live – there’s a bunch of really challenging stuff in there!”
This goes to show that while Intervals’ human-synaptic connections are certainly impressive, the memory palace of a wooly Mammoth is none too shabby, either.
- Memory Palace is out now.
