Big Bottoms: Joe Lester of Intronaut on How to Jazz up Your Sludge Riffs
Unlike many of their peers, you can’t listen to Intronaut and ignore the fact that they have one of the most original bass talents in the genre today. Joe Lester, the band’s bearded purveyor of pulse, has been giving the up-and-coming prog-sludge luminaries an otherworldly yet intellectual harmonic bent with his fretless bass stylings since their inception.
Joe is Intronaut’s secret weapon. The haunting, mournful belch of his fretless bass pulls and bites the mix to give Intronaut songs their indelible vibe. Guitarists Sacha Dunable and Dave Timnick, of course, deserve a good deal of credit for knowing when to let Joe loose. Though he’s adept at adding thickness to a riff, he has an even greater affinity for tastefully venturing beyond what a normal rock bass player would do with some room to move—reacting to chords with “jazz” notes and to rhythms with complimentary ones.
I caught up with Joe to talk about his introduction to metal, jazz and the fretless bass. In our Q&A he offers insight into his harmonic and rhythmic objectives when working on Intronaut tunes; as well as his right hand technique, how he achieves supremacy of tone and what it’s like to hang out with Justin Chancellor.
Do you feel like the bass player is sometimes under-represented in metal?
Yes and no, and here’s why: In so many forms of rock music the role of bass has almost degenerated into just another guitar without chord ability. That’s why for so many people there’s a cliché of, like, bass being the easy instrument.
When I was in high school, growing up with Sacha—everybody in Intronaut goes back to high school or before that—we used to listen to a lot of death metal, and I love that to death, but the lack of bass always left me interested in other kinds of music too.
So you were already a bass player at that time?
Yeah, actually bass was my first choice of an instrument. I got my first Squire P-bass on my 13th birthday.
You have a very unique style. Not that there’s anything wrong with supporting the riff, but your playing in particular takes it much further. Is that because of your interest in jazz or from somewhere else?
Thank you. [Jazz] is a big part of it. Even after being a full-fledged metal head and playing in metal bands in high school, I had a concurrent interest in jazz that was sparked by one of my older friends, Mike Lerner. He’s Behold… the Arctopus’s electric guitar player, and he grew up here in L.A. with me and Dave from Intronaut. We were best buds in seventh grade. So, Mike really took me and Dave under his wing and showed us the ropes of how to be a band.
I took a mild interest in jazz in high school and got in the jazz band and then really grew to love it almost as much as the rock music that had always inspired me. So I made the choice to study contrabass jazz in college, which was really a challenge way outside of the box for me. I had been a rock bass player my whole life. But I spent four years concentrating on upright and jazz.
Jazz means different things to different people. A lot of people think of it as a cliché based on the old styles of jazz. To me, jazz is freedom with harmonies that are more complex than the normal chords that you see in a lot of rock music. In a way, I think that’s one of Intronaut’s cool advantages. We can mix heavy styles and move into jazz harmony, alterations and stuff like that.
What I’ve always liked about Intronaut is that it’s not clear-cut all the time when Intronaut is venturing outside of typical sludge riffing.
Absolutely. I even find that I’m not too proud to recognize often that when we have a real rocking riff, it actually benefits from the bass doubling the guitar. Even though I have an approach to playing outside of what the guitars are playing, I know when that’s appropriate and I’m proud to hold it down when that’s needed.
A lot of times, in the cleaner parts, where I’m breaking away from what the guitars are doing, really all I’m doing is thinking of jazz harmony, like maybe what a jazz piano player would do over the basic chords that the guitars have.
How did you come to introduce the fretless bass in Intronaut? Was that always one of the ideas for the band?
Yeah, it was. I’ve actually been playing the exact same bass for twelve years on every Intronaut album and at every show we’ve ever played.
When I was in high school and playing rock bass but starting to take an interest in jazz, I think I just met a dude that had a fretless bass. It just took me aback a little bit at all the doors it opened for articulation and stuff.
When I was in eleventh grade, I had my first cheap-ass bass de-fretted and spent a year playing that just to make sure that I could do it. It was a little daunting, the idea of going fretless. But I played the shit out of that Squire for a year and got comfortable with it and then committed to having a custom fretless built for me. That was in the year 2000 and I’ve been playing it ever since.
I’d like to ask you about the song “Australopithecus” from Prehistoricisms [2008]; how did you come to write that bass part? There’s a kind of samba groove and there’s a ton of chordal stuff.
You mean the clean part or the Latin-y part?
The Latin part. I said Samba, but I’m probably using that incorrectly.
Yeah, [that part] has the same bass line both times, only the second time it’s played on upright.
A lot of times when it comes to those cleaner parts in Intronaut songs where there’s some room for me, first I try to think of a rhythm that is complimentary on its own. It’s not just a random thing because it has some sort of intent to it, and then I just start borrowing from those jazz notes that are available. Even if Sacha and Dave are only playing a major chord, I’ll go to the seventh or the sharp eleventh and put in those jazzier flavors.
So that was pretty much how that part began. But towards the end you’ll notice that each time we do it, Dan [Walker, drums] and I switch from doing one sort of rhythm to another, but we imply sort of a different feel even though the guitar part is the same. And I’ll tell you straight up that we borrowed that trick from Miles Davis.
Do you find yourself using certain amps or settings specifically for fretless bass?
Yes and no. I’d say the primary factor in my fretless tone that makes it much brighter and punchier than a lot of regular fretless basses is the finish on the neck, which is this super hard resin that makes the fingerboard shine like glass. It gives you a glassy, bright attack, especially compared to an unfinished wood board. Again, I think that’s something that was inspired by Jaco. He would laminate his own basses and now every brand has some sort of option to finish the fingerboard like that. So that’s the main thing.
But also I do tend towards amps that are not as traditional, just in that so many bass players go for the Ampeg classics—and I dig that, I think they sound cool—but my bass style is almost like fusion bass. So I prefer a more crystal clear, modern sounding amp. So what I’ve been using for the past couple years is Ampeg’s SVT 8, which has a tube preamp and a solid state power section. So it sounds monster. It’s 1,300 watts and it weighs 30 or 40lbs.
I have to give a 100 percent shout out to Chris Johnson at EMG who used to be at Ampeg. He’s really one of the most inspired dudes in that side of the industry. He loves music, he loves supporting young talent. When he was at Ampeg, he kind of rounded up three young bass players that nobody knew and just slammed us onto the Ampeg roster and was having us do signings at NAMM right next to these badass bass legends. The other two dudes were Evan Brewer, who I’m sure you know, and another cat named John Reshard.
I’m interested a bit in your plucking technique. Jaco, I believe, tended to pluck very close to the bridge and I see you centered more in the body of the bass.
I’d say that almost, without really thinking about it, I end up traveling to different spots on the bass when picking. You’ve seen me, probably, plucking a lot on the neck pickup, which works for a lot of what I’m doing, but sometimes on the heaviest parts, I’ll go back to the bridge, like Jaco, and slam the strings a little harder to completely change the tone without using a pedal. It’s all in the attack.
When I go up to the neck it’s a lot fuller, a lot fatter; sometimes on the really sexy, jazzy parts I’ll be playing almost at the bottom of the neck.
Especially when you’re playing finger-style and comfortable with finger-style, over the years you start to—almost unconsciously—move more towards the bridge or the neck depending on the specific tone of the part.
Bass-wise, is there anything on the new record that you were trying that is notably different from previous Intronaut albums?
What I’d say is one of Intronaut’s strengths, something that I’m proud of and has grown gradually from album to album is moving away from chops being central to the songs. Not that we don’t employ technique, but really trying to bring the focus back to song-writing.
That was something that started to get me disenchanted with metal during my later years of being a bonafide death metal head. It just got so every song on the album sounded the same and they were all just pummeling displays of speed and technique, but the songs aren’t memorable, they don’t flow together.
We all grew up pretty fucking metal, but we love Yes, we love King Crimson, Pink Floyd, bands that write albums where every song is different and you want to listen to the whole album. That’s definitely going to be apparent on the new album.
Then half of the time when I’m writing a bass line, I found myself maybe trying to come up with something more active and then deciding that the part would be served better with something simpler. But there are definitely my spots, where I get to bust out for sure.
When you were on tour with Tool last year, what were you able to get from Justin Chancellor in terms of advice on bass or otherwise?
Oh, dude, Justin is one of the coolest and most accessible dudes ever, actually! He and Danny Carey are the dudes in Tool I knew before we toured with them. He’s super cool and down to Earth. We collaborated on the title track of Valley of Smoke. I got to know him slowly, but working together really made him grown to respect me more. We had this real connection.
We definitely had a lot of great nights on that tour when we were partying, but he was giving me a lot of advice that was not about bass playing, per se, but just about surviving when you’re really trying to be a band and make it, and that was invaluable.
