BREAKING IN A SEQUENCE - Time to Acknowledge your BIAS
How BREAKING IN A SEQUENCE Found Its Voice
Written by: Tom Wilson - Sense Music Media | Wednesday 24 November 2021
If you were a fan of heavy music in the 90s and 2000s, you know damn well who David Silveria is. The California tub-thumper helped usher in nu metal as the original drummer for multi-platinum pioneers KORN, playing with them from their inception until his departure in 2006. After briefly surfacing with the short-lived CORE 10, he has spent the last few years BREAKING IN A SEQUENCE, alongside bassist Chris Dorame and guitarists Joe Taback and Mike Martin. They had the groove, they had the desire, and they had the muscles (seriously … have you seen David lately?) All they needed was a singer. Enter: Rich Nguyen …
Pictured: Rich Nguyen, Joe Taback, David Silveria, Mike Martin + Chris Dorame - BIAS
Talk Some SENSE with David Silveria & Rich Nguyen
How on earth did you guys end up meeting?
Rich: Oh, man … They had another band before this band … CORE 10 … They decided to leave that band and start a new one, so they did a singer search. They put out a press release and everything asking people to send in their bio and their music and all that. They got a few hundred submissions that they had to sift through. They chose three singers out of all of those hundreds of submissions, and they sent tracks to them to sing over, and then they brought them in to rehearsal. One guy came from Germany to try out for these guys. I think the two other guys were from San Diego, California. I think they were going to decide on one of the three, and at the last minute, they were like, “Let’s try one more dude.” And I was that one more dude, and they sent it to me. I took their song and I heard it, and I was like, “This isn’t the way I want to hear it,” you know what I mean? So, I changed the song, and I sent it back to them, and they got all pissed when they first heard it! They were like, “Who does this guy think he is, changing our song?” All the other singers, they just took the song and sang it verbatim, with the structure that was given to them, and I took it a little bit further. I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I just thought that it would be better.
Such a power move…
Rich: I didn’t mean it to be a power move, but it turned out to be a power move.
[David Silveria joins the Zoom, and appears in front of a wall covered with platinum records from his days in KORN]
Look, we get it, you’ve got platinum records… [Laughs]
Rich: I know! He’s got to rub it in my face every single time. [Laughs]
David, that feels like a power move, and we were just talking power moves with Richard’s vocal audition for BIAS, with how he changed up the song. What are your recollections of that?
David: Well, when we originally heard it, we were being immature, and we didn’t really think it through. We were just thinking, “What’s this guy doing? Thinking he’d come in and chop up our song? Why would he even do that?” And then we listened to it a few more times, and we looked at each other, and we thought, “This actually makes more sense. It’s much better now, because the song makes sense.” … We got over that really quick. It took us basically that one time to realise that Richard can come in and do whatever he wants to the song to fit his vocals, because that’s ultimately what it’s all about. It just took the one time for us to get through our stubbornness and realise that it’s the right way to do things.
Rich: And we’ve been doing it the same way for, like, three years now.
Pictured: KORN at the 1999 MTV Music Video Awards with their trophy for Best Rock Video
Photo by: Henny Ray Abrams - Getty Images
There feels like a vintage vibe that calls back to that classic nu metal period, with the instrumentation and the drumming and whatnot. To what extent would you agree with that?
David: I do think that the music sounds similar to the 90s development of nu metal, as everyone called it, with a new, modern vocal twist.
Rich: I agree. And it’s David that makes it sound that way. No, I’m being totally honest. It’s David that makes it sound that way. He’s got that sound to him when he’s playing, and that kind of groove, because when we start off with riffs, and we hear riffs in our head and everything … I’ll bring in a riff [with] total metal drums in my head, and then David will start playing, and it’s totally different, and I’m like, “Okay, we’ll run with that!” We kind of learned how to work together that way, and you never know what to expect when we start writing a song, especially with David on the drums!
David: I haven’t progressed at all. [Laughs]
I remember an early interview with you David – I mean way, way back in the KORN days – and someone asked you who your influences were, and I remember being struck by your answer, because you were like, “We’re just influenced by ourselves.” You may have mentioned HELMET a bit. Does that ring a bell?
David: Honestly, my biggest influences for drumming were Tim Alexander from PRIMUS and Mike Bordin from FAITH NO MORE.
A lot of FAITH NO MORE references coming up. You guys should do a cover. Have you thought of doing Midlife Crisis? That would be a great idea.
Rich: [Laughs] Nope. Damn, let’s do that, David!
David: Alright, we’ll do it. We’ll do a video, too.
Rich: Alright, cool. Let’s do it exactly the way they did it!
One of my formative musical experiences was hearing KORN’s Good God when I was ten, and thinking it was the most feral, angry shit my young mind had ever been exposed to. I taped it off the radio and almost wore out the tape. What were some of those experiences for both of you? What were some of those early encounters with music that just grabbed you by the balls?
David: I mean, back in the early days, when I first started playing drums, I was literally playing anything that would come on the radio, so all over the place. [From] hard rock, to what would now be considered pop, I played anything and everything that I could get on the radio. I just played it.
Rich: For me it was hearing PANTERA’s Far Beyond Driven. When I first heard that record, just the whole thing, it floored me. I was like, “This is so heavy.” I remember hearing Slaughtered for the first time, with that riff, and all of a sudden the drums kick in and he’s just growling – you know, he’s death-growling through the chorus, like “Slaughteerrrrreed!” Oh my god – this is crazy! That was that same experience.
What have been some of the best live music experiences you’ve had as an audience member, and why?
David: You know, probably the best-sounding band that I’ve ever seen live is MUSE. They sounded amazing. I’ve seen them a few times now, and they always sound really good.
Rich: For me, there are two things that stand out. I went and saw PANTERA on that Far Beyond Driven tour, and that was amazing. Another instance that stands up is seeing KORN and METALLICA on that tour. That was … I think it was the Peachy tour?
David: It may have been the Peachy tour. We toured with METALLICA a bunch of times, but that may have been the first.
Rich: I saw it at the Forum. I think ROB ZOMBIE was there too? I can’t remember. They’re all starting to mix up. But I just remember that show being crazy, because it was like the nu metal and the old-school metal, and both metal worlds were colliding for me, so that was when I was exploding in my head! [Laughs]
Pictured: KORN album covers - Follow the Leader and Life is Peachy | KORN at 1999 MTV Music Awards | Backstage with RAMMSTEIN 1998
I had a taped version of the Family Values Tour from 1998 – that infamous video with the RAMMSTEIN tour and whatnot. David, what sticks out when you think back to that period?
David: That tour was amazingly fun, and not just from playing on stage, but hanging out with all the different bands, and getting to know each other. That was an amazingly fun tour. All of them … There are many times I probably shouldn’t speak about, but there were many things that stand out in my head as great times with those guys! [Laughs]
It’s a good thing that nobody had a video camera, and there was no evidence or anything. [Laughs]
David: You know what? I do have a picture on my Instagram … You’d go offstage, and sometimes you have to walk in weird places to get back into buses. This place was an underground [parking bay] … I have a picture of me standing on the side, and the guys from RAMMSTEIN, just after they came offstage, walking up the ramp to go back to their bus, and they’re wearing, like, diapers, and they’ve got shit all over them, and silver paint all over them, and the diapers looked like they’d shit themselves. It’s on my Instagram. It’s me standing on the side, and them walking past me. It’s pretty ridiculous.
What’s coming up next for BREAKING IN A SEQUENCE?
David: I’m sure we’re going to continue to write, obviously. I’m really not sure when we’re going to be able to take the stuff onto the road, because of all of the backlog of shows that are booked, [now that] they’re just now being able to open up again. So we may have a while before we can take it back to the road, but maybe we’ll get lucky and slide in with somebody who’s opening act bailed out or something.
Rich: On the other side of things, we’re working on getting our second EP out. I don’t know how much of the first EP you’ve heard, but we released the first EP last January, and I was trying to get the second EP out last month, but it just didn’t work out, so instead we released Twine, just so that people could have new music. I imagine we’ll have all of the logistics and everything squared away for the second EP in early 2022, so we’ll put that out. We’ll continue writing, and hopefully we can get into the studio and track our latest material, which, in my opinion, is some of the greatest material we’ve written as a band, and maybe we can release that as a full-length. Who knows? We’ll see how it works out.
The 2021 EP Acronym is out now across all streaming services
Pictured: Chris Dorame, Joe Taback, Rich Nguyen, Mike Martin + David Silveria - BIAS