TesseracT guitarist James Monteith painted a grim picture of the bands headspace during the past year via his column at Thrashhits.com. An excerpt from that can be read below:
“Let’s be straight up; the last year has pretty much sucked for TesseracT. We lost our singer from our debut album, much to the disappointment of fans, we parted ways with our US management, lost our US booking agent and stopped getting any gig offers in the UK / Europe.
One plus was that we got to work with the phenomenal vocalist Elliot Coleman, who joined the band to replace Dan Tompkins. But with him living in the US, the impracticalities of writing the second album were far greater than we envisaged, so we found ourselves down a singer once again in June.
Various people in the industry were concerned that we wouldn’t be able to come back from this, and told us that another singer change will lessen fan confidence even further. And just went we didn’t think stuff could get any worse, our one and only tour of the year (with Animals As Leaders, no less) was cancelled. With no singer, no gigs and a massive drop in industry confidence, it’s pretty safe to say that summer 2013 was a bit of a low point for us.
I remember when Metal Hammer contacted us about being nominated for Best UK band at the Golden Gods, and we were thinking “Really? Wow if only they knew WTF’s going on”. However being nominated was obviously a massive thing for us, and definitely helped us keep focused and fix the mess that we’d gotten into. Some people still seemed to believe in us!
New material was coming together and sounding pretty good, so all we had to do was sort our shit out, so we set out to find a new vocalist immediately. After auditioning what felt like hundreds of people, from known people in established bands to enthusiastic kids, the man for the job was under our nose the whole time. Acle (Kahney – TesseracT‘s other guitarist) had mixed Ashe O’hara‘s band Voices From The Fuselage a while back, and when he played them to us we were all like “he sounds awesome, let’s see if he’s interested!”
Everything from his studio and live performance, to his writing style fit perfectly. The new single Nocturne was actually his writing audition, and it turned out so great that pretty much all the ideas made it to the final version!…”
