With 94.1 JJO Band Camp just days away, we caught up with headliner Korn’s drummer Ray Luzier during a sound check in Montana to chat about the band’s latest album, their current tour and what to expect from their set on Saturday.
Badger Herald: Tell us about your new album, The Path of Totality.
Ray: We’re always writing stuff and Jonathan is always writing stuff, and this time he met up with a couple of dubstep artists, and he burned a couple of songs from Skrillex. We were pretty blown away by it, but we didn’t know that he was actually going to write words over top; we just thought it just may be a side project. But then the dubstep world is a real tight circle, and Skrillex said you gotta check out 12th Planet and 12th Planet said you have to check out Noisia, and so forth, so we brought them all in. Skrillex produced our first single, “Get Up,” and we were really blown away, and it just went from there and now we’ve got 13 songs. And you know, Korn has always had an element of hip-hop, and rap, and punk, so to me it wasn’t like, extreme this time. Everyone is like, “Oh you took such a left turn with dubstep,” and I’m like, “Not really. It’s still a Korn record.”
BH: What influenced the shift toward dubstep? Was it just Jonathan or was it just a collective thing among the band?
Ray: It started with Jonathan, primarily. [The album] was supposed to be a five-song EP. We didn’t plan for this kind of thing, but then he was on such a roll and so excited and so high over it that it just kept going. It wasn’t one of those things where we took three months off the road and sat in the studio with Ross Robinson, our producer, to hash songs out and record them. In this case we recorded all over the world. We were in the middle of a tour, and with techno these days you can do anything like that. You can have a show and sing a vocal track in Seoul, Korea, do a drum-track in Hawaii, and then we’d monkey with it back in Bakersfield in our two days off and record a guitar track. It just sort of got done that way this time instead of us taking time off.
BH: How have fans responded to the new album on your current tour?
Ray: It keeps getting better, which is pretty cool, they were sort of digesting it at first. People with open minds and people that aren’t afraid to cross genres were really into it at first, but then you get the die-hard metal fans that want an old school Korn metal record. The moral of the story is you can’t please everybody, but people with open minds seemed to be more receptive to it. And people that doubted it, when we played it live were like, “Wow, this is way better live!” You hear all kinds of feedback, but the great thing is now everybody is singing “Narcissistic Cannibal,” “Way Too Far” and “Get Up” just as much as they’re signing “Freak On a Leash” and “Blind.”
BH: Is electronic a direction you’ll continue to move in with another album, or was that just a one time thing?
Ray: We’re just now getting in and starting to pick away at writing, and right now there’s really no say about it. I don’t think we’re going to completely lose the electronic element, but we can’t make the same record again, so obviously it’s going to vary from Totality. But I know that we’re going to get in a room again with several producers and try it that way, so how it’s going to come out, who knows.
BH: What can we expect from your performance at Band Camp?
Ray: We split our sets in thirds. The first third is really old stuff that die-hard fans love. We do everything from “Helmet in the Bush,” “Alive,” “No Place to Hide,” “Divine,” those kinds of songs, and then we switch up and take a short break. I have to switch out my snare drum for the dubstep set, so we have to take a couple minutes to set that up. Then we do five or six songs off the new record, and then we switch back and do the bigger hits. Our catalogue is so huge now that it’s really hard to choose. We always have people who say, “Oh, you didn’t play this, you didn’t play this,” but its one of those things where we try to get in as many songs as possible and listen to the fan requests.
Korn will perform at JJO Band Camp this Saturday at The Alliant Energy Center. Other headliners include Hurt, Taproot and Slaves on Dope. Gates open at 11 a.m., and tickets are $42 in advance or $55 at the door. Visit jjobandcamp.com for more info.
