Devin Townsend has continued with his podcast series where he describes the creation of his 2011 album off his Devin Townsend Project, Deconstruction. Throughout his podcast series, Townsend has deconstructed the creation of each of his albums, starting from the beginning.
Townsend began the podcast with some new details about his upcoming albums, Puzzles and Snuggles. He stated that Puzzles, which was initially supposed to be released sometime last year, has gone through a multitude of different versions since when it was first meant to be released. Townsend stated he would like to share the other versions of the album so as to give fans an idea of how the sounds have changed throughout his process. After talking about his upcoming albums, Townsend then launched into the creation of Deconstruction.
“Deconstruction was a big step on this path,” Townsend said. “Even the name, Deconstruction.”
“Deconstruction was created in a very utilitarian manner, and by that I mean there was so much involved with just articulating this on a technical level that I had no time to really get deep into the process,” Townsend said in the podcast. “And I mean, of course I was deep into it, if you’ve heard Deconstruction clearly immense amounts of effort went into it. But unlike Alien, unlike Infinity, unlike even Ziltoid, what I did with Deconstruction is I approached it very nine to five. Woke up, sat down, I went through a section at a time. I knew what my objectives were, I knew who I wanted to have involved with it, I knew what I wanted it to sound like. I knew how complex it was and how easily each one of these sections would disintegrate and deteriorate into chaos if there wasn’t a lot of attention paid to the clarity between the instruments and making sure the performances were good. So I would just dig into it every day.”
Townsend explained that the reasoning behind deciding to approach Deconstruction as a nine to five job was to help with the stamina needed to create an album.
“I needed to be psychologically, you know buffered against the intensity of that, because I find as I get older, well my threshold for intensity is just low, low, low, low, low,” Townsend said. “Just every year it’s lower. So what I did was I concurrently did the recording and the producing of Deconstruction.”
Past podcast episodes have seen Townsend sharing the making of his albums Addicted, Synchestra, Devlab and The Hummer. Townsend’s upcoming albums, Puzzle and Snuggles, will also be accompanied by two films and a graphic novel. It was also recently announced that Townsend will be doing sound for an upcoming 14-episode children’s show on the BBC.