25 in '25: ISIS talk 'Celestial'

25 in '25 is our series of in-depth looks at classic albums hitting their 25th anniversary in 2025, told by the people who created them.

Ask a group of ISIS fans their favorite record and you’re likely to get a mix of albums spanning the group’s entire discography. Each release found the five-piece exploring new ideas, expanding upon their identity, and pushing boundaries for both listener and band alike. It’s no wonder that ISIS are looked back upon as a major influence, and pioneers of what would eventually be called post-metal.

But in the beginning, like any other band, ISIS were figuring out just who they were. The early EPs, Mosquito Control and The Red Sea, planted the seeds, but their first LP, Celestial, was the germination into the roots of what the band would become. The record laid the foundation that the five-piece would build upon on subsequent releases, dialing in on key elements that remained at the core of their sound until their ultimate split in 2010.

On Celestial, the influence of bands like Neurosis and Godflesh on ISIS was still palpable, but the group was beginning to expand outward to create their own unique voice. The record's dense production highlighted the band's use of repetition, open space and electronic accompaniment. Celestial was heavy, visceral and hypnotic; a record that traversed music styles and scenes to become a classic in the underground music world.

With the highly influential record hitting its 25th anniversary in 2025, original ISIS members Aaron Turner (guitar/vocals), Jeff Caxide (bass) and Aaron Harris (drums) each took the time to speak to us about the writing and recording of the album, as well as how it sits in their mind 25 years later.

SGNL>01

Looking back, there's an evolution between the first couple EPs and Celestial that maybe isn’t overt, but it seems like the groundwork for what ISIS becomes afterward is laid down on that first LP. Do you see that in retrospect?

Harris: I think when you start a band, at least for us, you have a vision of what you want to sound like, and you start playing with some people and you kind of sound like who your influences were. I think we wore our influences on our sleeves for the first few records. It was pretty obvious who we were influenced by. You have an idea for a band and you have an idea for what you want to sound like and you toss around those ideas and you inevitably end up sounding kind of like a rip off at first. Once we figured out people like what we're doing and we're starting to develop a fanbase, and it was time to do our full-length record, I think some of those influences were still there but not so obvious, and then some other influences come along.

Turner: It's hard to get an objective view of it, especially this far away from its initial inception. I've revisited those early EPs a couple times over the last few years when we were prepping them for rerelease and I can kind of hear the bits and pieces that were premonitory for what came after. So for me, it doesn't feel like it's a big leap from one to the next, necessarily. But, I think there were two things that happened that were fairly significant between the EPs and the first full-length. One is, early on, especially the demo and Mosquito Control was us collectively groping for a voice for the band, and it initially was an amalgamation of our different influences and a little bit of our own original ideas woven in there. By the time we reached the first full-length, though there's still some obvious touchstones there, I think we also started to find our own way into a more organic and individual songwriting approach. I think there's just that natural progression of going from the sum of your influences to finding a voice of your own. The other most significant thing was we went from three different lineups from the demo and Mosquito Control being one, Red Sea was another, and then finally Celestial was our third incarnation, which also ended up becoming the final formation of the band from that point forward. I think that was the other major turning point; we got everybody who was going to be in it and started developing a more consistent chemistry between those five people.

Caxide: Celestial is when we solidified what would be our final lineup. Mosquito Control had a second guitar player, Randy [Larson] from the band Cable, but he didn't end up playing on that record, he had quit before we recorded and we had Chris Mereschuk in the keyboard/electronics role. And then for Red Sea we got Jay Randall [of Agoraphobic Nosebleed] on electronics and that's when we got Mike [Gallagher] on guitar. Not long after that, [Bryant Clifford Meyer] replaced Jay and that became the core lineup and Cliff became a big part of that. I think he wrote the entire last song on that record, "Gentle Time," and he sings it too. I think we had something with these five musicians where we really clicked, and we had been a band for a couple years at that point and you're getting a little older and your goals start to change. Being pummeling, loud, and heavy was still very much a part of the goal, but wanting to really expand on what we were doing, I think Celestial was the starting point. 

Harris: Mike was experienced. He was in a band called Cast Iron Hike who was a more typical hardcore Victory [Records] band, and I had played in my old band before Isis with Cliff and in some of his projects. He'd been playing music for a long time. It was a combination of being in bands and playing music for a long time along with their influences, and just them as people. They really connected with what we were doing and having a little more experience, and meeting us at the place where this was something that we were taking pretty seriously now. It wasn't a fun thing to do on the weekends, we were trying to do this as a full-time thing and they were on board with that. Between their personalities and their commitment and their abilities, it really matched up nicely with what we were looking for.

Caxide: Mike is a really good guitar player, and so is Cliff. I think Cliff wanted to be our second guitarist before we got Mike, and then when we were looking for a keyboard player he was like, "I play keyboards too." He brought a completely different set of skills. He's very musically inclined. He's probably the best musician out of the five of us. It was just a different perspective, after playing together for a little while we knew this was what we wanted. The electronics, the keyboards, we weren't really sure where we wanted to go with that and then when Cliff joined it was like, "This is what we need." He can play piano; he can actually write songs. It was adding another weapon to our arsenal. Same with Mike—he was in Cast Iron Hike, he was an accomplished guy. He'd been on tour, he'd been in a band for a while and he brought a different sense to it. The guy we had playing guitar before Mike, Randy, he was mostly a bass player, he wasn't really a guitar player. He learned to play the songs and could write a riff, but Mike could handle more complicated things.

Harris: I think it was just developing our sound, figuring out who we were as a band, getting a chance to do a full-length with a producer—it was the first time we worked with Matt Bayles and he went on to do Oceanic and Panopticon with us and that kicked off that relationship. Having a little bit more budget to go into a bigger studio and have a little more time, that was huge for us. There was a lot of creativity, a lot of influence and a lot of excitement at that time and it just kind of all worked out.

Were there new influences entering your mindsets?

Harris: I remember specifically being really heavily influenced by Mezzanine by Massive Attack at that time, and also Fantastic Planet by Failure, and White Pony by Deftones. Those were really big influences for me personally at that time, and the other guys had stuff. Mezzanine was definitely an influence that the whole band was feeling at the time. The first song on [Celestial], the drumbeat was sort of influenced by that record. It's a little faster but it has that hypnotic hip-hop kind of groove to it.

Caxide: We used that [Massive Attack] song, "Angel," as sort of a template to write the song "Celestial." It's kind of one groove that keeps going and just builds and builds and builds. That song directly inspired the song "Celestial." A lot of stuff was coming into our orbit. I think Aaron Turner actually played Mogwai for me the first time I heard them; it was Come On Die Young and I was like, "This is great; this is like Slint."

Turner: I remember the Massive Attack thing for sure. I remember Jeff and I were both listening to a lot of Earth 2 and the Dead Man soundtrack, which has a pretty overt influence in a couple spots. Then there was all the other stuff, which had already been there like Melvins, Godflesh, Swans, Today Is The Day, Neurosis. I definitely remember the Massive Attack thing in reference to the first song. I remember a section or two with a more specific nod to Mogwai.

Caxide: I never came into this kind of music from a metal scene. I was never a metalhead. My journey to punk rock and hardcore and all that stuff started with alternative music and stuff like The Cure or Skinny Puppy—anything you would see on 120 Minutes. I started to become more comfortable with wanting to incorporate that stuff into what we were doing. I remember really listening to Murder Ballads by Nick Cave a lot during that era. 

As we recorded Celestial I became a Beatles fan because the studio we recorded it at had a little hangout room upstairs and it had a little TV and VCR, and the only thing they had on VHS was The Beatles Anthology documentary. During my downtimes I would just smoke pot and watch those and I became really into The Beatles. I was in a massive Pink Floyd phase of my life when we did Celestial. There is a good two year period where that was the only band I listened to, pretty much; I was obsessed with Pink Floyd. It probably annoyed the other guys. I was really tripping on Pink Floyd and a lot of classic rock when we were doing that.

Turner: There was a breakdown part in "Collapse and Crush" that I think may have been Shellac-inspired as well. I remember listening to some things like Shellac and Mogwai and maybe some things that fell a little bit more into the noise rock or math rock or post rock category. Also listening to things like the Lull project that Mick Harris did that was totally ambient, and the James Plotkin/K.K. Null collaboration, and Fennesz; just a few things that were more in the abstract, experimental or ambient zone. Those things informed some of this too, where we trying to bring textures into the songs or come up with these interludes between songs. That was all a part of it in the background, too.

Harris: Beyond music, there was so many cool movies coming out which was another really big influence for us. When we did Celestial there was a movie we were watching a ton that had a really big influence—Dead Man. Dead Man was a really big influence on Celestial—the movie itself but also Neil Young's score. There's a song on Celestial, "C.F.T." That song was really influenced by Dead Man.

You were surrounded by, and touring with, other bands who were also pushing the boundaries at the time. How influential was it being part of this creative scene?

Caxide: Everyone was influencing each other around that time. Our first US tour was with Cave In, and seeing them in the middle of this transformative period was massively influential. They would just jam on stage at random points in the set every night and it was always very spacey and pretty and it would go into some pummeling riff. That had a big effect because I was like, "This is what I want ISIS to be." Not just this monolithically heavy thing, but I wanted to be more expansive and dynamic, so I would say it was hugely influential. 

Seeing Neurosis every night, too, and how they perfected what they do. Again, I wanted to be that good and I wanted to have that effect on an audience that these guys had. It was hugely, hugely influential. Obviously the goal wasn't to completely mimic what they were doing, but how do we take influence from this and make it our own? I think at some point we talked about incorporating visuals into our live show but we always came to the conclusion of, that's Neurosis' thing and you really can't do that without looking like a complete fucking clone of them. 

Turner: Just thinking about where we were and our direct peers, Cave In and Converge come to mind because they were in our area and we spent a lot of time with those guys. And we were close with the band 27 as well, who were in a totally different realm, but we were all part of the same creative community. Ayal [Naor] of 27 had put out that first Harvey Milk record and I remember him giving us a copy of that. Jeff had been in a hardcore band with Mike Hill who later went on to form Anodyne with Ayal from 27. So there was all this crossover with these various groups of people and in different ways we were all pushing out of the framework of hardcore and starting to incorporate these other things. Converge obviously in some ways kind of spearheaded the metalcore thing where they were taking the DIY hardcore ethic but really applying this more ferocious extreme metal approach to what they were doing. Cave In had this psychedelic space rock thing that they were injecting into it. Mike Hill and Ayal in Anodyne started having this thing that eventually morphed into almost a black metal textural atmospheric thing in what they were doing. 27 wasn't in any way heavy necessarily, but they had this very dark and spacious aspect to what they were doing. 

So, all of these things were feeding into each other where we were talking about records we had a mutual appreciation for, spending time in the van together just playing different music, Jeff and I living together sharing music. I think all of that was really helpful in melting these genre barriers where most of us had started in a more semi-traditional hardcore framework and were expanding outwards from there.

Caxide: I grew up in central Connecticut and moved to Boston, the goal of that was to start something cool, and around that time good things were happening in Boston. Aaron [Turner] had shown up from New Mexico and was doing Hydra Head and that was starting to take off; Converge was sort of always the local heroes, always a big deal even before I moved up there; Cave In was starting to get a lot of attention, I think they had just put out Until Your Heart Stops and I think when we all heard that we all knew it was something special. It was cool to be part of that.

Harris: I remember people asking what's in the water in Boston? There was so much good shit coming out of Boston. It just feels normal for me; I don't know why it's specific to Boston. It was us and Cave In and Converge and a few others. There was always cool shit coming out of Boston and I don't know what attributed to that. It's a big college town and a lot of people were there going to college. Maybe that was it, people were just drawn there for college and ended up playing music. It just felt like a perfect storm in a weird way. I don't know what it was, but it just had such a strong creative music scene at that time. Not just Boston; everywhere. Chicago had so much cool shit coming out of there. I remember Touch and Go releasing a cool record like every week. If you wanted to get into hardcore there was always a cool new hardcore record coming out or a cool new metal record, or hip hop. So much cool shit.

SGNL>02

What was the general writing process during this period?

Harris: Somebody would bring in a riff; usually it was Turner. He was really great at coming in with an idea. He was a riff-writing machine. He would come in with something he had worked on and the other guys would add their opinions and influence to it. I don't ever remember a song being fully written by any one person, I think it was all pretty jam-based. Not jam like dudes jam to try to figure out an idea, but here's an idea and let's jam on it and see where it goes. At that time we didn't have ProTools or really any way to document our songs, so it was really just trying to remember it the next day. Sometimes you would come back to play something and it would be like, "I'm pretty sure that's not the riff we were playing yesterday because it's not matching what I'm playing." Or it would shift a little bit and you didn't realize and it would actually work better the next day. You had to use your brain a little more. It was a lot of collaborating, but usually kicked off by a single idea.

Turner: I don't remember exactly; the general process from Celestial into Oceanic and Panopticon was very often Aaron Harris and I playing as a duo where I had some riffs written and Aaron and I got together and sketched out some outlines, and then everybody else worked on those outlines together. There may have been some variation to that method while working on Celestial, and certainly there are parts of the album that other people contributed riffs to, but Aaron and I took those structures and hammered them out together. 

Harris: Once it felt like there was a song base to build something off of then it became a lot of jamming. We'd play a part and somebody would mess around with trying to do something over what was there. Some days, honestly, nothing would happen. It was frustrating sometimes, but sometimes it was like, pick it up tomorrow. We would just rehearse after work in the evenings after everyone got off their jobs and just try to work on stuff. One part would lead to the next and the next. The vocals always came at the end. Aaron always added the vocals when we were in the studio, so it was never about trying to build a song around a vocal melody or a chorus or anything like that. It was always these little journeys and wherever they went, that's where they went. I think we tried to construct them in a way that it would build, getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Then Turner would add the vocals in the studio and that was just the way we did it.

Caxide: People would come in with fully formed ideas that got deconstructed and sent on a different path. It was always democratic, I think maybe that might've contributed to the downfall of ISIS—maybe it was too democratic—but back then it was a lot of Aaron Turner bringing ideas and sometimes just working it out with him and Aaron Harris. For Instance, the song, "C.F.T." is just those two, no one else plays on that song. We ended up doing a live version of it that transformed into something else, but that's mostly how it started. 

The blueprint for most songs was Turner bringing in ideas and then we would chip away at it and see where it went. There was some ideas that were brought that went nowhere; there were some that came in sort of half-formed and became some of the better songs on the record. That was our process for that record; during Oceanic it became more democratic, where everyone was bringing ideas in, everyone was writing, everyone had something to say.

Harris: For me as a drummer, I felt like it was trying to find, for lack of a better word, a groove that worked to elevate what Turner was playing or what Jeff was playing. Jeff kind of played in a not very typical bass player kind of way. His influences were The Cure and his bass lines were kind of the lead of the song. Sometimes I was playing off of what Aaron was playing, or Mike, or even Cliff, or sometimes off of what Jeff was playing which was something in a kind of typical rhythm section way where your drummer and bass player are working off each other to lay down a foundation and the guitar players are doing their thing over that. With ISIS I tried to feel out what felt right to emphasize and tried to really play dynamically and give stuff movement and that build where it's like, maybe the energy is starting at a place of thirty percent and slowly builds to that one hundred percent.

Turner: I think we were equally interested in making an album at that point, and also having the opportunity to spend a little more time in the studio and refine our songs in that process. First and foremost, they had to feel good to play in the practice space. If they felt like they had a captivating energy when we were playing them in the practice space, that was when we knew an idea was worth pursuing. The genesis of any particular song had to come from all of us feeling a part and knowing that it had some kind of potent energy to it. That was without any forethought of if it was going to be played live or recorded or whatever. It was more just about being in the moment and feeling excited about what was unfolding when we played these pieces together. 

I can't say where everybody else's head was at necessarily, but it's my recollection that we were equally interested in creating a powerful record as much as having songs that felt like they worked well when performing them in the live setting. We didn't have any kind of recording capabilities at that point. I don't know, maybe we made some handheld cassette recordings, but we were not doing any demoing, really. I did some on my digital 8-track, just for the guitar parts so I could organize them and maybe play them for other people, but when it came to full band stuff we didn't really do anything except play the songs until we knew them well enough to record them. We couldn't really reflect on what they were going to be like in the studio or listen back to them to consider the arrangements, it was really about the moments in the room.

Some of the key elements of Celestial that become the core of the ISIS sound are the repetitive, hypnotic riffs and the juxtaposition of loud and quiet parts.

Caxide: I don't think its any secret that Neurosis was a huge influence on the band, especially on Aaron Turner and myself. They were sort of the template of what we wanted to do. Aaron and I were huge fans, and then after seeing them live we were even bigger fans. We wanted to do what they were doing, basically. It's so heavy and yet there's this beauty in this heavy ugliness that they create. I do think there was some lateral thinking between the bands, but obviously they were hugely influential on us. Not just them, there was bands like Godflesh who were a little bit more mechanical, very heavy, very repetitive, but there was some beauty in it too. Melvins, too. Bands like that. 

Harris: Neurosis was obviously a huge influence for us early on. It was probably our number one reference for starting the band. I think it's very obvious if you listen to the early music or even watch some of the early lineup. That song "Angel" on Mezzanine had such a hypnotic quality to it. I just loved that drumbeat and thought it was so cool. The drums reminded me of a Led Zeppelin kind of thing but the bass was like dub. That's the first time I was introduced to something like that and I just loved it and I just really was influenced by it. Bands like Mogwai became a really big influence later on. They were building into that hypnotic thing that grew and grew into this massive sound.

Turner: The hypnotic thing was definitely influenced by things like the Earth 2 album and Godflesh and Swans and Neurosis, where you could take a part and just play it basically as long as anybody could stand to play it with the idea that you were beating your consciousness into submission and allowing this other more primal aspect of self to take over. That was certainly something I was very invested in. There was some kind of emphasis in other sectors of the hardcore world or metalcore world, or whatever, where bands were just slamming together as many parts as they possibly could into a song. Dillinger, that's a good example. It was this very frantic stop/start thing which was invigorating in one way and spoke to a certain kind of energy, and I think we were on the other side of the spectrum where it was about the slow build and the tension created from long-form repetition. In some ways, if you take even just those two examples, it's a push in more extreme directions with what had already been established, and trying to find out what happens when you take those things and move them further. 

As far as the loud/soft dynamic, back and forth, I think that just kept the songs more interesting to play when it wasn't just this constant bludgeoning churn from beginning to end. Obviously that kind of visceral approach had its own satisfaction. However, the longer we played together, the more interested we became in that interplay between different dynamic ranges, and we noticed very early on how much more powerful each of those approaches became when there was that really sharp juxtaposition between them. I think later on we became less prone to go from super quiet to super loud instantaneously and it was more about the gradual build, but early on it was these very abrupt changes. I think part of that was intentional and part of that was also that we just hadn't expanded our songwriting palette beyond these more basic modes of construction where you had these little modules, like this section slammed up against this section with very little emphasis on transitions. Everything felt like it had more impact when it was juxtaposed with something of a totally different character rather than just going full bore from beginning to end.

Caxide: That was part of the concept of the band in the very beginning before we ever even played together, to be expansive and dynamic, and pummeling, heavy, loud was a huge part of the goal, but it was always just part of it, and I don't think we had really figured out how to incorporate those other elements quite yet. Celestial was the beginning of us figuring it out. That just came from us playing together. The goal was always [having] longer songs, each song be its own journey, so that was always part of the mission, but I think we were just starting to figure it out on Celestial.

This time period produced a lot material—Celestial as well as the SGNL>05 EP. Was this just an incredibly fruitful period for the band?

Caxide: The lineup was solidified and we were just going, just writing. I think we had set a date to record and if I remember right, we were working on stuff almost right until we went into the studio. Things were flowing, so we just kept it going. If we had too much we'd just make an EP out of the stuff that didn't make the record. That was a big fucking to-do [laughs]. What's going to go on the record, what's going to go on the EP? I believe the song, "Divine Mother" was one of the first songs we wrote during the Celestial period and I was really adamant that that be on the record, and obviously I lost that battle. We can't just have an EP of the songs we liked the least, we have to have a real banger on there. We were all early 20s at that point and most of us were smoking a ton of weed back then, and when you're young and stoned everything is exciting, you know? It was the most exciting thing in the world. It was a super creative and exciting time.

Harris: I think we found our lineup and we had set out to do this thing and it was working. We were exploring some, what shall we call it—not heavy drug use, but there was some psychedelic use and some marijuana use, and that was creeping into the writing. Also music influence—there was so much great stuff coming out at that time and we were getting to tour with really influential bands. It was a really creative time in our lives. We just couldn't create enough and I think when we were ready to do Celestial, we just had more stuff than we wanted to put on an album. 

Our songs were long, we never wanted to bore people, even with our live shows it was like, "It can't be longer than an hour." There's no reason to see a band for two or three hours. So we always tried to be cautious. It's way better to leave people wanting more than saying there's a couple good songs, or it's too long. People listened to music a lot different at that time. We had eight or ten songs, so we wanted to save the others for an EP. I think with pretty much every record there was always a few songs that when it was time to wrap up and get into the studio they'd get cut. Sometimes we'd record them and save them for other things or sometimes they just got forgotten. In this case there was enough there to do an extra EP.

Turner: None of us really had lives in the sense of being adults where you've got real responsibilities and kids and all that. Jobs for most of the band were a means to an end, a way to pay rent. I was in the position, fortunately, where I was basically just going to school and running Hydra Head, so I was able to escape that particular chore, but for everyone else, the jobs were just a means to an end. Nobody was pursuing a career by working at the Newbury Comics warehouse or whatever. What we were all mostly interested in was being in a band and writing music and going on tour. Those were the goals, and given that that was the case, I think we pursued it as consistently as we could. 

There didn't seem to be any shortage of ideas, there was never a lack of riffs to work on or shows to prepare for. It was really just going from one thing to the next. Of course, it took a while to develop some of this stuff, but instead of going home and watching TV, or going out to party, or having to go home and take care of family, it's either go to practice or work on some ideas. So when you've got that kind of focus and you're lucky enough to not have so many other responsibilities, then it's easy to spend a lot of time working on music. 

It's funny to think back on it now, it seems like it took forever for us to finally get that first full-length done and get it out, but in retrospect, all of that stuff happened over a short period of time, I think we were just impatient. We had a lot of ideas and we were anxious to get through one thing so we can get onto the next.

SGNL>03

What are your memories of recording Celestial?

Turner: We had made those EPs and that was great and it was nice to make a recording and have something tangible come out of it, but Celestial was the first time where we got into the studio and we had enough time to focus more on the performances and make sure we were playing as well as we wanted to, but also develop the sound a little bit more. That felt really critical for us. We knew what we were going for and what we wanted to present. We worked with Matt Bayles for the first time who seemed really interested in not just helping us churn this thing out, but in helping finesse the character of the record. It wasn't necessarily an easy process, because I think at points we had very different ideas about what the aesthetic should be, but we really did have this opportunity to present our voice in a more fully-realized way, and our focus in the studio was very much on that.

Caxide: We recorded it somewhere in Massachusetts in a barn. I think Cast Iron Hike had recorded their album there. It wasn't rushed. I think we were in that studio for a few weeks. It was longer than any of us ever had in the studio before. Mosquito Control was all done in a couple days, The Red Sea, same thing, and now we had weeks. We had never recorded an album like that where the drums are tracked and then everything else was overdubbed. It was way more downtime than I was used to.

Turner: I think we spent ten days beginning-to-end tracking and mixing what ended up being Celestial and SGNL>05, and that felt like a really big chunk of time to us at that point. Matt was very good at being a taskmaster. I think he had a checklist for every song, or some kind of a thing like a dry erase board where he was keeping track of all the steps for each song and making sure we got through everything that we wanted to get through in the amount of time that we had given ourselves. It wasn't necessarily this luxurious process where we had time to do a take and listen to it and talk about it; we had all of our ideas really hammered out before we in, including things like acoustic overdubs or different amps.

Harris: I remember getting into the studio and being like, "Wow, this feels bigger." The studio was bigger, we've got a producer, we've got more money and more time, we can experiment. It's not like we have to do this in three days, we have a whole week. I had two days to do my drums instead of half a day. It just felt exciting and we were doing stuff to tape then, and none of the albums were done to click. It was really just getting in there, hitting record, recording a take, and move on to the next one. 

We just kind of camped out in the studio. We were in there making this album and we would take time off from work. It felt like a really exciting and important thing for us to be able to do that. We prepared a ton for it, and I think the most fun we had as a band was when we made our records in the studio. It was all about creativity and building this thing that we'd been working on for years. I always loved being in a studio. I think it just felt like, now it's time to create. We've done the work, we're ready, and let's make this thing and make it as cool as we can.

Were the songs firmly in place or was there room to experiment with different ideas?

Turner: There was no time for experimenting in the studio, it was more about giving time for Matt to mix at the end so that we could all get to mixes that we were really happy with, but also making sure on the front end that all of the performances were as tight as they could be. Some of that was frustrating because there was things on the record that people really tripped up on, and Matt was a taskmaster and would make people play it over and over if necessary. 

Then, when it got to the mixing phase we had different ideas of how it should sound. We were all about low-end emphasis and these really darker tones, and I think Matt's natural inclination was for brighter, airier stuff, so we had to find some way to meet in the middle, and it ended up creating what I think is a really cool aesthetic and a really unique sounding recording, but it took some doing to figure out how to get there—and some yelling and door slamming at times. 

Harris: We knew that we would have the stuff written enough that it would be done and we'd be able to record it and we were ready to record it, but also there would be time to experiment. With me, it was sounds, like, "Let's try this snare; let's try a roomier sound; let's overdub some toms in this part." That said, I didn't have a ton of time. For me, I was always the one who went first, so there was always that pressure of you can't fucking take five days. You've gotta get it done in two days. The other guys are counting on you and you can't blow everyone's time. I felt a little pressure there, but everybody else too, they had their amount of time to do what they needed to do. I had some time to experiment, but for me as the drummer it was pretty much nailed down when we went into the studio. I think the exploration and the trying stuff was more for the other guys who were trying different guitar sounds, trying different layers and textures and different stuff on top of the core ideas that were there. For the drums, it was pretty much done. When we went in to record, what I was going to play was there and that was that.

Caxide: With everything we've ever done, we've always been well prepared when we go into the studio. Some things change here and there, not drastically, but almost every record we have a song that was a little bit looser that was mapped out but we would see what we could come up with in the studio. The song on Celestial that was a little bit more open and not fully hammered out was the instrumental song, "Deconstructing Towers." That had more wiggle room to experiment. We had the first couple riffs and then it just descends into a whole bunch of noise. That was having fun in the studio and trying out different things. Aaron brought his acoustic guitar. Caleb Scofield of Cave In—who is very sadly no longer with us—let me borrow his bass synthesizer pedal and I used it on that song. That was when I was starting to experiment with pedals. I think I had a distortion pedal and a delay and that's all I had for Celestial. Caleb was nice enough to let me play with some of his toys for that one. He actually let me use one of his basses to record Celestial. My bass was a piece of shit Jazz Bass, which was fine for a live setting but recording we wanted the bass to sound as good as it could, so I used Caleb's bass. 

I would say we were always very, very prepared going into the studio with the exception of one or two songs. I think for Aaron and Aaron when they recorded "C.F.T." I think that was open to more interpretation of what it was going to be. There was skeleton there but the whole thing wasn't mapped out yet. We came to the conclusion of let's just keep it drums and Aaron's guitar and it sounds fine, that's how it should be.

What did Matt Bayles bring to Celestial that made you want to continue to work with him on subsequent albums?

Caxide: I think it was something we all could agree on which is very rare between the five of us. I remember even talking about who was going to record this record. It seemed like we were never going to find anyone that we all could agree on. Initially my idea was, I wanted J Robbins to do the record. Aaron Turner and I were really big Jawbox fans and I was thinking he wasn't known for doing stuff like this, how cool would that be to bring in a guy who has a completely different set of ears and isn't that familiar with something like this? I think something different and unique could come out of that. I guess no one really agreed with me [laughs]. I remember thinking we'd never find anyone, but I remember Turner, doing Hydra Head, had just gotten Botch's new record in the mail—it must have been We Are The Romans. He was like, "Hey, I just got this Botch record and I think it sounds sick, what about this guy?" Botch had a great relationship with him, I had heard the record and was like, yeah, sure, and everyone agreed. 

Matt was a little bit of a prickly guy, not like over the top asshole or anything like that, but he's very opinionated, and Celestial really came out great, we thought, and when it came time to make another record we thought, let's try that again. He just became a part of what we do and I always thought he captured a different side of the band. I always heard, "You guys don't sound on record the way you do live." I kind of like that, when a band sounds different from the records live. I think it's a little bit more exciting when you start to hear different things from the recorded version.

Harris: Nothing against the other producers we worked with, but really it was about time. We did the other two albums in like two days because you couldn't afford to mess around and be in the studio too long. It was a lot of money for us at that time, and it was also about finding time to record. So there just wasn't the budget or the ability to really work with people before. We wanted to have a budget, we wanted to have a producer who could push us and work with us. 

With Matt, it was great because he would make us replay parts. He would say we could do that better, or let's try this. He wasn't there to flesh out the ideas or help us in the songwriting but he was great at making us really get good takes and lock in and make sure we were always in tune. He got really great sounds. He brought all that to the record, which really elevated things because it tightened us up and it beefed up our sound and brought out more from us. Before, it was like, live takes, everybody plays at the same time, we have to get it all in a day or two days; just banging it out. There wasn't time to fuck around and get it super tight.

Turner: Part of it was just about getting good performances, and he was able to hone in on what people's parts were, what the interplay was between instruments, how all the pieces fit together, and then also these very minor deviations in performance that maybe a producer who was less attuned to that would have totally let slide. But I think the fact that he was so diligent about that really helped those hypnotic and almost mechanical sections feel more inhuman in a way that I think was really satisfying. There was this thing I think we were channeling that had to do with being human and having a very visceral, emotional aspect to it, but also in conjunction with, or maybe in opposition to something that was more mechanical and more elemental in a certain way. I think that was definitely accentuated by Matt's attention to detail in performance. 

The other aspect of it was that none of us knew anything about recording, Aaron Harris later learned a lot, and Jeff had done some work learning engineering in a school he attended for a while, but realistically none of us knew anything about recording, so Matt had this very seasoned set of technical skills that not very many other people we had access to had. He had worked in some professional studios, he had assisted on some big records, so he really knew what he was doing on a technical level. 

I think he was able to capture good sounds very quickly, and also interpret our suggestions or our vision in a way that was ultimately really satisfying. I think that was more difficult in some of our prior recording experience. Working with Kurt [Ballou] initially was pretty difficult because Kurt's approach to songwriting and to sonics was utterly opposed to ours, and I think at the time we really butted heads over that, and I think at the time we were also just trying to get things done super fast. Kurt, I think was largely self-taught, or at the very least didn't have a lot of recording experience at the time that we had worked with him. Matt was probably the most experienced person that we had access to in our realm of music. 

Caxide: Matt is very, very meticulous. I would think I nailed something and it was like, "No, do it again," and then we'd spend the next hour on one part. I'm not really sure what this guy's hearing that I'm not but it never got tense, it never got defensive. I just figured this guy knows what he's talking about and he wants me to do it again, so I'll do it again. It was more timing, tuning; Matt Bayles has bionic ears or something like that. He could tell when my bass was just slightly flat or sharp. 

The album is sequenced in a very theatrical way, especially with the SGNL interludes. Was that concept in place by the time you got to the studio?

Turner: I do think there was an idea to have those interludes from the beginning of the process, but I don't think we had a concrete idea about running order. I'm pretty certain we knew we had enough material for an album plus an EP, but we didn't yet know which songs were going to be in which release, so I'm not sure how that developed. We probably had to record everything and listen to it and then piece together how it was all going to go. 

Even SGNL>05, once we had allotted those songs to the EP, at that point didn't include the Justin Broderick remix, and it wasn't until we talked to Steve [Von Till] at Neurot [Recordings] and he was like, "Yeah, this EP is great, we want to do it, but could we add something to it to make it a little more fully fleshed out?" We thought about it, I think he may have suggested that we hit up Justin about that because they were working with him on a release already, and we were like, "Yeah, he's an influence and we love what he does, so yes, let's do that."  As much as we had all the songs fully formed and a pretty clear idea of how to approach them in the studio, the final form of both of the album and the EP didn't get figured out until after the fact.

Harris: That was another big piece of the puzzle for us, giving the album a theme and giving it a sequence or track order that gave it some sort of life or journey. Trying to sequence it in a way that felt like it took you on a ride from beginning to end. That was all very deliberate.

Caxide: Those SGNL interludes, that was me and Aaron Turner in his bedroom messing around with a 4-track or an 8-track and putting a mic up to his TV. There was some samples from the movie Altered States in those things. That was a lot of fun. Neither of us really knew what we were doing, but the idea was to record some interludes for the record, so yeah, I think that was part of the plan just to give it a little more of a thread going from the beginning to the end of the record.

SGNL>04

How did the lyrical theme come about?

Harris: That was all Aaron. It was pretty personal to him and he shared a little bit of the concept to us here and there, but a lot of it to this day I don't know what it's about and I just left it to be his thing. I think the other guys felt the same way. I think singing was this awkward thing to Aaron. I don't think he ever felt comfortable as a singer. I remember personally trying to push him because I felt like his singing voice was getting stronger and stronger. Looking back, I think there was times where I encouraged him to explore that more, where maybe I shouldn't have. I felt like he was really excelling in his abilities as a singer. 

Singing for the band from the start was always meant to be this extra textural thing, it wasn't meant to be the focus of the band. So that was something that was a deeply personal thing for Aaron that we kind of just let be his thing. He wrote the lyrics, he had to sing about this stuff, it was all stuff that he wrote and the concepts were his, so I think it was just this unspoken thing that it was his, and his alone. It was really important for us to have an element of mystery too. We really felt like our favorite albums were the ones where you didn't know too much and made personal relationships with them because the information wasn't there, so you have to assume what this stuff was about.

Caxide: I don't remember ever having those discussions specifically about Celestial. I remember Oceanic, Panopticon, Absence of Truth, Aaron saying he had these loose ideas for things, but Celestial I don't really remember that being a discussion at all. I left Aaron alone to deal with that. He was the singer, he's writing the lyrics, he's doing the artwork. I don't need to be looking over his shoulder asking, what's this about? Just let him do his thing. We're in this band together for a reason, so just trust this guy. I'm still not 100% clear on the whole concept of Celestial. 

Turner: With every ISIS record from Celestial, up through Panopticon and possibly with In The Absence of Truth, I wrote all these lyrics and I had themes in mind and I thought they were about one thing and then after several years distance from each of those records, I could go back and completely reinterpret them and see how it was directly connected to really personal stuff that I was grappling with at the time. I chose not to write in a way that overtly personal because I didn't want our music to have that character to it, I wanted it to be purposely more mysterious and maybe in some ways archetypal in the symbolism that was presented, and not necessarily more relatable for a wider audience. Maybe this was a reaction to a lot of the emo music at the time where it was this very high school diary confessional approach to writing lyrics, I wanted something that felt like it was more archaic and more abstract, and in some ways maybe even more akin to mythology than anything else, where it was presenting a narrative, however obtuse it might have been, and offering the opportunity for people to interpret that as they chose. 

I know what I was actually getting at in writing Celestial now, or at least big chunks of it, and it's funny how different that was from what I thought I was writing about at the time. I think there was also a level of self-protection that was going on there in that there was some painful, personal stuff that I was writing about that was veiled as this other thing, and it was probably stuff I didn't even have access to at the time but did in fact need an outlet, and I wasn't aware that it was coming out anyway, whether I wanted it to or not. 

Part of what makes art so interesting is that it's very valuable in terms of unearthing those things that are otherwise inaccessible, and also not only providing something for an audience to ponder, but the creator as well, and I have often enjoyed that part of being a musician and being an artist is making something and not having a full understanding of what it is until well after the fact, and even with the perspective that comes from time and distance, the full meaning of things is not always revealed, but at least I can now see that I was finding ways to communicate and to deal with these things that were very difficult but it was still happening and it was a therapeutic creative process.

What are your recollections of the artwork coming together? How impactful was it to have a member of the band who could produce the visual representation?

Caxide: When I met Aaron Turner I knew that if I want to do what I came to Boston to do, this guy has got to be part of it. I knew that right away from meeting him. We liked the same music, he was obviously a very motivated guy, he knew how to get things done, and he was insanely talented as an artist. It's funny, we're talking how to visually represent the band, but I didn't realize at the time that we already had our visual aesthetic that came from Turner. It's so much easier when the guy creating the music is also creating the artwork, because you don't have to explain what you're thinking to a guy outside; he's there at the practices, he knows. I personally always left him alone to do what he wanted with artwork, I never was looking over his shoulder seeing what he was coming up with. Almost every time I think he hit it out of the park, like, "That's exactly what it should look like."

Turner: It's been so long now that it's very hard for me to recollect what the exact intention was, and I will also confess that a lot of what I was doing at the time was purely based off of intuition and there was not a lot of really articulated forethought to my choices about what I was doing. When I think of this record, the artwork and the colors immediately spring to mind. I've always thought that it's really interesting when a person who is a musician is also a person who is responsible for making artwork for whatever the band is that they might be involved with. To me, it seems like that makes the most sense; who would have a better understanding of the character of the music and what atmosphere you want to impart than a person who has been involved in making the music itself? That doesn't always work, there's certainly examples I can think of where a musician has insisted on doing their own artwork to lamentable results, but when I think of bands, especially at the time that were very influential to me and to us as a group like Swans and Godflesh and Neurosis and things like that, if the artist wasn't doing all of the mechanics, they were at least pretty involved in the process of the visual presentation of their music, and that was part of the impact. 

So while I might not remember exactly what I was thinking in terms of those choices that I made when it came to the sleeve of that, I do think that I had an innate understanding of the music and what character it should have visually and atmospherically. It's hard to give too many specifics other than that whatever I came up with felt right for the record. That was sort of the approach to the songwriting too; whatever felt right and had the biggest emotional charge at the base of its creation was what I went with, or what we went with. In a lot of cases when working on the art for a record I would have a vague idea before sitting down to do it and then it would be a process of starting to put that vague idea together and reacting to what I was seeing. 

I don't have much recollection of working on this record other than, I remember where those individual pieces of the artwork came, other sources that I had basically stolen from film stills, clipart books, things like that. I remember certain aspects—all the type that is almost a textural element on the cover, it's kind of blurred out and dissolved, I remember printing that out on my laser printer and crinkling it up and scratching the surface to create that decayed effect. There's little bits and pieces of this that come back to me, but there's other aspects that I don't remember.

SGNL>05

Is there anything about Celestial that stands out in your mind as particularly important for you musically or personally?

Turner: The title track and "Collapse and Crush." Those were the two. Those were the ones that were the most consistently fun to play live. They were the ones that when they were recorded I remember listening back and being really excited about what I was hearing, and I think both of those pointed towards the future of what the band morphed into. I think both of those are the songs I can point to on that record that feel the most sincere representations of our band stepping outside of the bounds of our influences. It's not stuff coming from nowhere, but this is our voice more so than the voices of our predecessors. There were things within those songs that were the stepping-stones for songs that came thereafter. There were ways we learned to have interplay between instruments, how to construct a song, how to let ideas develop and have space and all of that became very valuable for us in moving onto the records that followed. 

As far as pieces within all of that that have stayed with me subsequently beyond ISIS, that's harder to say with any kind of precision because I can't really disentangle any of the work that I've done across the years because I can see all of the things that I was doing from pre-ISIS up until this very moment—things that I still do now that are ideas that have not exhausted their wealth for me. Whether it's rhythmic motifs or tunings or a type of feeling that arises, there's continuity throughout everything that I've done and it may manifest more noticeably, or more powerfully in certain records or across certain projects than others, but it's always been there in one way or another. I can certainly hear that in that record, in some places more than others, but across the whole thing essentially.

Harris: In mixing that record, I remember butting heads with Matt Bayles a little bit over the kick drum sound. At the time I didn't really fully understand this because I wasn't experienced enough—to get it to cut through the heaviness of the band, he was EQing my kickdrum to be a little clickier and to have a little more attack than I wanted. We kept butting heads on that and I kept saying, "Take the attack off the kick, I don't want that click on there." He was just trying to get it to cut through the mix because the record was so heavy—the drop tunings and the bass and the pure sonic layers; there's only so much space. 

He was just doing his best and I kept fighting him on that, and the only way to make it work was to keep compressing the drums to get the kick to pump and cut through, and we joke about it now, but it ended up kind of solidfying the overall sound of the record. Because it's so compressed, it's so pumpy, it's so heavy, that gave it a unique sound that ended up kind of defining that album, which is funny.  A lot of people have complimented me over the years about my snare sound, which I'm really proud of. Things that I paid attention to but wasn't sure if other people would, but they did, so that's nice.

Caxide: The last song we wrote for Celestial was "Collapse and Crush" and I remember listening to that after it was recorded and thinking, "We're going somewhere." This wasn't just five guys trying to rock out as loud as possible. That song gave me a different hope for the band, like, we're doing it. It hints at what would be to come. It's the first LP I had ever recorded, [I remember] being just so satisfied with it, which I had never been on any record I had done previously. Even Mosquito Control and Red Sea.

How do you feel about Celestial 25 years after its release?

Caxide: The fact that I'm sitting here talking to you about something that I did 25 years ago, I'm grateful. Aside from the music we created, one thing I always wanted was to have that lasting impact that a band like Neurosis has. Anybody who saw Neurosis back then, they remember that show to this day. It has that impact. Neurosis will always matter; 20 years later people will still be talking about Neurosis. The fact that we've been put in a similar position for some people, that is incredible to me. I'm immensely proud of that, that we had that impact on people that bands like that had the impact on us. 25 years later and it still matters. 

I talk to people on social media all the time, like "I saw you guys back then and it changed my life." That's amazing. Not many people get to go through an experience like that. I'm grateful and really lucky, I think, that we all found each other and created this thing that has had this lasting impact. I don't know how relevant we are to music today, but we did make some sort of lasting statement that resonates with people, so very happy about that.

Harris: It's crazy for me to think back to that time and just how dedicated we were, how much work we put into the band, the touring, and the way we toured is so different from today, and the way we made albums, the intention of the albums. It was meant to be listened to as a whole album. You had to go buy a physical copy. When we toured, we didn't have GPS or cell phones. I remember early on, driving to shows and we would play Connecticut and the next show is in North Carolina, and so we'd drive all the way there and we'd get there and someone would be waiting for us and say, "Hey, sorry, four people bought tickets and we just couldn't do the show." And we just drove for an entire day. It was part of the ride. Play a show in Montreal and drive overnight to Boston and get out of the van and walk straight into work because that was how we had to do it. 

It's crazy and it means a lot to me that people came out to see us play and bought our stuff and followed us, or would tell us crazy things like, "Your music helped me through this time," or the loss of a person or a battle they had. Crazy stuff like that. It's nuts to think about that record and that time. I think it holds up pretty well. To be honest, I don't listen to our records that often, but when I put them on I'm always worried if they'll hold up. But so far, it holds up and I'm proud of it still. I can't say the same for Red Sea or Mosquito Control. I think those sound probably a little rough at this point, but Celestial definitely still stands up to me and I'm super proud of it.

Turner: It's still one of the records for me that was the most fun to make and is still something I can appreciate front to back. In terms of the ISIS catalogue, maybe my favorite record we made. I guess it's odd to think that that record is now older than I was when we made it [laughs], so that's just a funny passage of time to consider. I feel like that was a very big step for us as a band and it was a very big step for me personally. I had never been in a band before that had made a full-length record, and to be able to look back on the first album I was ever a participant in making and to have a lot of fondness for it, and also actually be able to enjoy it feels pretty good. There's parts of it that sound clunky or immature, or parts that I'm like, "I know who we stole that from," but overall it's got a real character of its own and I think that more than anything else is what I appreciate about it.