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Jerome and Jyro, who made a name for
themselves in Christian rock/industrial music as Mortal
have formed a `mini-label,' Xhan records (pronounced `chan'),
to carry product from their new band, Fold Zandura. Jyro
says the album is "kind of a mixture of everything
we've done in the past. The emphasis is on the songs. It's
a lot more melodic, although there's a lot of programming
and technology that we put in there."
The first part of the name Fold
Zandura comes from John 10:16, where "Jesus talks
about how he's got `other sheep which are not of this
fold,'" Jyro explains, "and how He will
eventually be their shepherd." The second word of the
name doesn't actually mean anything: "The Zandura
part just sounded cool."
As for Xhan records, it's not
actually a label in the traditional sense. "We didn't
start it because we wanted to be like, a brand new
Christian label, reveals Jyro. "It's like totally
underground. We don't have distribution, or anything like
that. We're not like Via or Tooth & Nail. We can't
compete with any labels. It's just something to be able to
release our stuff under."
Fold Zandura will not be marketed
for any particular audience, but Mortal fans are sure to
want to snap up the new project. But what about the
mainstream market? "Our philosophy about music, and
what God has planned, has never really changed," He
says. "There has been major label interest, but
whether or not that happens, it doesn't matter to us. We
put our the music, and if God uses it, He uses it. If He
doesn't, he doesn't."
Up and coming label Five Minute Walk
is also releasing some Jerome and Jyro material&emdashwhich
will bear the Mortal name, though the guys will no longer
be touring under that moniker. "We can still do
Mortal records, but not do it live," Jyro explains,
"have Fold Zandura be the live entity, but keep doing
Mortal records, because there's still that part of me that
needs to come out still. I guess they're calling it a
praise and worship record, but I've always thought
everything we've done was praise and worship." Don't
expect tunes from this album to be on the next
Hosanna/Integrity praise tape. "It's not a sing-along
kind of thing," he continues. "There's some hard
stuff on it, there's a soft tune, and there's a ska
tune."
Contrary to whatever rumors you've
heard, Mortal is not dead, just not touring. Jyro and
Jerome are still going strong, and would be making plenty
of quality noise for quite a while.
RECENTLY THE MEMBERS OF FOLD
ZANDURA, WHO JUST HAPPEN TO BE THE SAME LADS THAT
CREATED THE INDUSTRIAL GROUND BREAKERS MORTAL
YEARS AGO, CALLED THE I-REV HOTLINE TO CLEAR UP A
FEW THINGS. THE CURRENT STATE OF MORTAL, THE FUTURE OF FOLD
ZANDURA, AND THE MEANING OF THE NAME FOR STARTERS.
ALTHOUGH FOLD ZANDURA WOULD BE CLASSIFIED AS
MODERN ROCK AND NOT NECESSARY INDUSTIRAL, THIS WAS THE
SECTION THAT HAD ROOM FOR A LAST MINTURE INTERVIEW. SO
DEAL WITH IT!
WHAT'S THE DEAL? IS MORTAL BROKEN
UP OR WHAT?
Jyro: Mortal, broken up? Gosh,
that's a hard one.
I KNOW THAT'S WHY IT'S THE FIRST
ONE.
Jyro: I guess ...I don't know where
to start... I guess since Mortal was never like a
"band' band, we never had an entity. It has always
been Jerome and myself, in the physical sense, we could
never really break up. It was a matter of the
circumstances that we were under that we needed to shed.
I've always wanted to start Fold Zandura a long time ago
and what the industry seemed to like was more of the
Mortal/industrial type stuff so we kept going to that a
little bit and then we had the opportunity to be able to
do the Fold Zandura, we jumped at the chance. I guess it's
just that personally, I'm musically restless. I'm sure
you've heard we're doing a Mortal project through Five
Minute Walk, and that's gonna be the studio-only entity,
and Fold Zandura will be the studio and live entity.
IS THE FIVE MINTURE WALK PROJECT
GOING TO BE A TYPICAL MORTAL PROJECT?
Jyro: No, it's going to be a praise
and worship thing, but in the traditional Mortal sense
where it's all programming, guitars, and yelling.
WHERE DID YOU COME UP WITH THE
NAME FOLD ZANDURA?
The fold part comes from John 10:16
where God says those sheep which are not of this old, but
I eventually will be their Shepherd, which is to me kind
of a challenge that there are people out there that maybe
don't believe or are alienated by the beliefs of the
Christian subculture, but are living Godly lives but they
just don't know how to put hands and feet to it. I think
they just need to look past the subculture and find Jesus
Christ. I think God wants to embrace as many people as He
could. It's just that it's hard to get through barriers.
WHAT ABOUT THE ZANDURA?
Jyro: I just thought it sounded
cool.
WAKE WAS DEFINITELY A DEPARTURE;
YET IT WAS STILL REFERRED TO AS MORTAL. HAD THAT NOT BEEN
UNDER YOUR PREVIOUS `SET OF CIRCUMSTANCES,' WOULD YOU HAVE
MADE WAKE A FOLD ZANDURA RECORD?
Jerome: That was more of a
transitional album.
ARE YOU APPROACHING FOLD ZANDURA
DIFFERENTLY ON A LYRICAL LEVEL?
Jyro: I don't want to take away from
anything we've done as Mortal. But I had to craft things a
certain way, make the words come out so that if it wasn't
sung it would make an impact just spoken or read. With
Fold Zandura, the songs come out so that if it wasn't sung
it would make an impact just spoken or read. With Fold
Zandura the songs are a lot more personal. It's how
emotions are crafted I guess.
JEROME, YOU'VE RECENTLY RELEASE
PURA.
Yeah, "Mortal present Pura."
NOW, IS THIS ALONG THE SAME LINES
AS JYRADELIX?
Jerome: In a sense, yes, but it's a
little less techno than Jyradelix, more like soundtrack
music. On a side note, I guess one whole new aspect about
being able to do a Mortal album is the fact that since
we're starting our own little tiny label, Xhan Records,
it's an opportunity for us to actually own all our music.
Jyro: We've always only been
concerned with two things. To be true to ourselves and our
art is one. The other is that our major purpose it to
glorify God. I think doing something because of external
forces is pointless, especially if it's music. For a while
we were feeling that it was a matter and obligation. It
was no one's fault, but finally we can say that we are
true to ourselves and our art. Hopefully, that glorifies
God. Everything else is really extra.
The new Fold Zandura CD, Dark
Divine, and the new Fold Zandura hats and shirts are
available either from the band on tour, or exclusively
through True Tunes Etceteras. For a complete price list
see the mail order catalog or call 1-800-669-8783. (TTM)
FOLD ZANDURA
by Bruce A. Brown
Most folks look back on their
college years as a time of expanding their intellectual
horizons; a time of examining different lifestyles and in
some cases, cramming enough useless knowledge into their
heads to help them make a decent career choice. For Jyro
Xhan and Jerome Fontamillas of Fold Zandura, college meant
two things-the beginning of an 11-year partnership that's
still blossoming ("Some days," Jerome recalls
with a laugh, "it seems like we've been partners
forever!"), and the first steps of a musical quest
for the perfect pop song. "Actually," remembers
Jyro, "I've been writing pop songs since I was in the
sixth grade. Anything we can do to get closer to The
Beatles sonically and musically, the happier I'll
be."
The first musical entity for which
Jerome and Jyro became well-known was Mortal. Jyro
explained that Mortal's intense industrial sound was
partly based on the equipment available to him and Jerome
as well as the duo's admitted musical limitations.
"Industrial music was easy to do with the kind of
recording gear we had. I wasn't a guitar player at all-I'm
still not much of one. Barre chords-which is what you
mostly play in industrial-are much easier to play. And I
could barely sustain a singing voice, so screaming was a
lot easier as well. So things seemed to point in that
direction for Mortal."
Even though Mortal became one of the
first and best-known industrial groups in Christian music,
Jyro says he and Jerome have always experimented with
different vocal and musical approaches. "I consider
myself a piano player before anything. It's my main
instrument. A couple of the tunes that Fold Zandura does
now, I actually wrote before Mortal. And some of the songs
we're writing now for our next album are much more
melodic." Just prior to the formation of Fold
Zandura, Jerome and Jyro completed two final and musically
divergent Mortal projects with long-time engineering
partner Mark Rodriguez. "Pura," explains Jyro,
"was this ethereal praise album that we've always
wanted to do. The [5 Minute Walk] Mortal album was
something that we wanted to do to help [5 Minute Walk
president] Frank Tate and he wanted to do to help us, so
we both really benefitted from that. It contained some
left-over songs that we didn't want lost; we really wanted
them out there. We also tried to launch Xhan Records, our
own little label, at that time." Jerome adds that
"'King Flux' and 'Fray Lagoon' from the Mortal album
were songs that were around when Andy Prickett [of Prayer
Chain] first started working with us. 'King Flux' was
actually recorded as a Fold Zan demo. Andy played all our
early shows. He'll always be a mentor. Even on the new
stuff, he helped us with sounds. You can hear his guitar
ideas on the Fold Zan indie CD."
Like a lot of the best musical
adventures, Jerome says that Fold Zandura started without
a lot of preconceived notions about what should happen
next. "The group actually became Fold Zan when Frank
Lenz joined in April of 1995. We were just working on
songs for awhile and decided to do some demos for
ourselves to see if we could start a band. We didn't know
for sure how these songs would sound until we tried them
with a band. Plus, we didn't want people to say that we
were just changing our name because we felt it was a whole
new thing when Frank joined. Frank also sings, which adds
a new dimension and makes it feel more like a band."
Part of the texture which makes the
music of Fold Zandura so interesting is the group's
judicious use of sound effects and samples, both on album
and on stage. But unlike many groups, Fold Zandura doesn't
disguise a lack of musical ability with tape loops.
"We knew that, on stage, we'd have three people
trying to do the job of seven," admits Jyro.
"Jerome and Frank are really the only people I felt I
could trust, musically. Andy Prickett too, but he couldn't
go on tour. It just seemed the natural thing to do to put
stuff on tracks and use samples. Plus, when we were first
trying to formulate our sound, it was the samples that
really made it different from anything else we'd ever
done. We knew we had to incorporate that into our live
performances." Jyro feels that approach has helped
make Fold Zandura a very powerful and tight live unit; a
band that he says continues to evolve. "Jerome is
able to concentrate on singing and playing bass, instead
of having to cover a number of areas. With Frank, he's the
dynamo of the band. His ideas give the songs a different
kind of vibe. And the direction that we're taking with the
new material is quite different. We want to be a pop band.
So, we're all pretty much in tune with that idea,
sonically and musically."
Fold Zandura recently signed an
agreement with Sub*Lime Records, a modern rock division of
Essential Records. The label has scheduled the release of
Return, an eight-song CD which contains five songs from
the band's limited-edition indie CD and three new songs.
Jerome says Fold hopes to re-introduce itself with the new
disc. "We only made about 5000 copies of the Fold Zan
CD. So the only people that could buy the CD had to pick
up copies from our tours and the few stores which carried
it. We re-mixed five songs from that CD for this new disc,
plus we added an instrumental and two new songs,
"Return" and "Forever Throw," that
we've been doing live for awhile. But the record company
felt it would be essentially a new album to most
people."
And what about the name "Fold
Zandura," the moniker which has probably attracted
more attention to the band than the group's music itself?
Simple, says Jyro. "I made up 'Zandura.' We used that
name to describe this environment we sometimes reach, on
stage or in the studio, where we find ourselves closest to
God, close to touching His face. Plus all of us are
totally into sci-fi, so 'Fold Zandura' became this actual
place, and the band became these characters who inhabited
this story about this place. Frank, Jerome and myself all
had different roles in a story about this place and the
songs became a description of our lives in this place.
Hopefully someday we can do a video and show part of how
we've imagined this place to be. And we don't mind people
wanting to know."
Even though Mortal enjoyed a certain
amount of success in its day, many people felt the band
never reached its full commercial potential. And even with
the excitement Fold Zandura generated before signing to a
major label, Jyro says he wasn't sure that the band was
going to survive. "In the past year or so, I've been
seeking some kind of explanation for what we've been
doing. We weren't on any label, we were touring, but just
breaking even. We had no sense of where we were going to
end up. In anything that we do, we always ask ourselves
why we're doing it, what's the goal." Jerome says he
feels Fold has persevered "because, over and over,
God has proved Himself to be behind what we're doing.
Sometimes, when it didn't feel like we should be where we
were, from a financial or practical stand-point, or even
spiritually, God has always confirmed that we were doing
was right. We were at the point, before the agreement with
Sub*Lime, where we felt like we might give things a few
more months, one more tour, and then re-evaluate. Then
Robert Beeson and Essential came along and the Sub*Lime
deal happened. We feel like God's hand is in this new
venture, or we wouldn't be pursuing it. There's a fine
line between self-confidence and arrogance, but we
honestly feel we are balanced in that area. If God decides
to open the floodgates and allow us to make inroads into
the mainstream market, we believe we're ready."
It would seem that in Return, Fold
Zandura may have come close to pop perfection, offering an
album that resonates with deep spiritual overtones and yet
contains enough of a personal connection to the band to
attract an audience of non-Christians. In fact, Jyro
refers to Return as "a relationship album. There's a
strong spiritual presence to the album, without it being
along the lines of what people might traditionally be
looking for in a Christian album. But I think that makes
it all the more powerful. It would be easy to place my
Lord's name inside a pop song. But that doesn't mean it's
going to be used by the Holy Spirit. Placing a blatant
message in a song just to get a certain response is not
necessarily the best way of communicating. We want to be a
rock band that makes good art, and remains open to God,
instead of trying to dictate to the public how we
specifically see God. I'd rather my witness be more
holistic, involving all of my life."
© 1997 7ball
magazine
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