By Kelley Simms
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH 'EM
Rivers of Nihil
P
ennsylvania technical death metal band
Rivers of Nihil come into their own on
their third studio album, Where Owls
Know My Name, (Metal Blade) released last
spring. The ten intricate tracks weave spacey
atmospheres with electric energy and jazzy
interludes. The entire 57 minutes is an experi-
mental journey with proggy Pink Floyd influ-
ences, natural progressions and great transi-
tions between louder/faster and softer/emo-
tive segments. Plus, they throw all convention
out the window by introducing the saxophone
on several tracks. Six-string bassist/vocalist
Adam Biggs spoke to Illinois Entertainer
about the new album, how they utilized the
sax and the band’s trajectory.
34 illinoisentertainer.com march 2019
Mosh: What was the main focus of Where
Owls Know My Name compared to your pre-
vious two releases?
Adam Biggs: Honestly, the focus was on just
writing better songs, and just writing songs
with more memorable hooks and choruses
and things [so] that people would return to the
songs to listen again. And that does include all
those extra touches that we added, and things
that maybe people couldn’t catch the first
time.
Mosh: Illustrator Dan Seagrave once again
created the album art. What was the concept
for this record, and did you offer him guidance
or suggestions?
AB: I always kind of write up a treatment for
him and [try to convey] if we have stronger
visual ideas [for each album]. On The
Conscious Seed of Light record, I just gave him
lyrical concepts, and song titles and 'here’s
generally what the album is about' and have
him do whatever he wants. And we got this
really cool looking landscape. But with the pre-
ceding two records, I had a more focused idea
of what I wanted to see the cover art be. But I
still didn’t want to give him too much direc-
tion where he couldn’t add his own touches to
it. So I just sent him all the lore of this new
record and said I wanted this kind of aggre-
gate looking face with lots of little details,
which is something he’s really good at. But
you don’t see him paint a lot of up-close per-
sonal face things like that, and he even said it’s
something he typically doesn’t do, so it was
really tough for him. But it turned out great.
It’s a pretty iconic album cover.
Mosh: What does Where Owls Know My
Name signify?
AB: You might know that we’ve been doing
this sort of pre-planned seasons concept with
the records. So we’re up to the fall record with
Where Owls Know My Name. I’ve had this
whole concept sort of mapped out since
around 2012. I sat down and fleshed out
where I want the general narrative arc to go
and had a bunch of titles in mind and Where
Owls Know My Name was always one of them.
I’ve always been magnetically attracted to it,
but the other band members didn’t really get
it, and I can’t really say that I got it either until
I started writing lyrics around it. It’s this rep-
resentation of complete removal from human
things. It’s a place not necessarily physical, but
mental; more so that a person could reach
where they feel detached from other people
and machinations of humankind.
Mosh: What inspired you to use the saxo-
phone on several tracks?
AB: Our friend Zach (Strouse) who plays sax
on the record, we knew he played sax, and
he’s really great at it. He’s a music teacher. We
saw the opportunity to maybe do it, but we
were aware that other metal bands had done
this, so we knew we weren’t smashing any
boundaries with it. But also, our thought
process at the time was we’d probably enjoy
listening to it ourselves, so let’s just do it any-
way. So, we had him go through a run on our
demo of “The Silent Life,” which is probably
the second or third song we wrote for the
record, and we liked what he did so much that
we kept finding spaces for him on the record
as we kept writing. We were going in with the
idea that we’re not the first people to do this
ever, but we like it, so we’re going to keep
doing it.
Mosh: I think it shows that you aren’t afraid
to step outside the box and experiment with
different elements.
AB: With this record, for better or worse,
largely the idea would be people just general-
ly had rejected Rivers of Nihil as a whole. We
just wanted to make stuff that we thought was
cool. And we saw opportunities to add a lot of
these elements and utilize them in songs and
decided that regardless of what people would
think of it, that’s what we wanted to do.
Previously, the band hadn’t been exceedingly
successful in any real way, so we just decided
to make a record with all these trappings of
the progressive rock or experimental art rock
band, plus death metal that we’ve been work-
ing on as a band for ten years now.
Mosh: Track “Terrestria III: Wither” is the
third part of the instrumental series that
appears on all three albums. What’s the impe-
tus for creating this interwoven instrumental
series?
AB: We always wanted to have some kind of
instrumental passages on each record. So I
was finding a way to fit that with the concept
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