By Carl Begai
Teramaze first became a blip in Australian headspace back in 1995, launched by guitarist Dean Wells and laying claim to two full length albums by the time he was 18 years-old. It was a short-lived pursuit, as Wells abandoned Teramaze in 2000 for what turned out to be a fruitful career as a songwriter and producer for TV programs including X Factor and Australian Idol, as well as an assortment of pop artists. It was only a matter of time, however, until Wells felt the need to escape the formatted structure of the pop music machine in favour of creating music on his own terms. He relaunched Teramaze and returned in 2012 with Anhedonia, following it up with Esoteric Symbolism a short two years later. It’s been a re-learning curve for Wells, which culminated in the creation of the band’s most progressive work to date, Her Halo.
“It was a good eight years,” says Wells of his pop industry days. “I got into writing a lot of heavier stuff and my publisher at the time told me they liked it but had no idea what to do with it. Somebody finally said ‘You should do a Teramaze album.’ I hadn’t even thought of that because I considered Teramaze to just be something I did as a kid for a bit of fun. I realized I did want to do it again, and around the time we started taking it seriously Jeff Waters from Annihilator heard the stuff and wanted to get involved. He was down in Australia at one point and he came in to produce most of the album with me. So, I put out Anhedonia in 2012, which came out of the heavier stuff I was writing a few years earlier.”
“Before Anhedonia there was nothing from Teramaze for eight years. People think we’ve been around for all this time, but no, there was a massive gap in between. We don’t really play any of the old stuff, but now that people are starting to realize this is the same band from back then we’re thinking about bringing some of it back. But it does seem to people we’ve done more than we actually have.” Continue reading BraveWords Interview: TERAMAZE – From Out Of The Ordinary…