TEAMING UP
Transcend the Realm joins Scalafrea, NM’s Fields of Elysium on tour
Adeveloping friendship with a New Mexico band recently advanced into a tour for California’s Transcend the Realm. “We’ve always been huge fans of the band Fields of Elysium, so we’re really excited that we get to tour with them,” said Transcend the Realm guitarist Christian Mansfield. “They’re local, from Santa Fe. Basically how all three of the bands on this tour package got together is our last summer tour we played in Denver and we met the band Scalafrea and they already happened to be friends with Fields of Elysium, so we started talking and Scalafrea had already planned to do a January tour … a West Coast tour, so we just decided to do one all together.”
Transcend the Realm, which formed in 2010, released a demo in 2011 and its first album, “Severed from Reality,” in 2014. It released its EP “Perennial Discoveries” last June. It describes its music as progressive/technical/death metal.
In addition to hitting the road, the band is working on new music for a concept album.
“It’s going to be our first concept album that we’re working on,” Mansfield said. “We’re really excited for it, and we’re working hard on it. We’re going to actually make it two EPs, so it will be like a two-parter. And we’re just changing some things up. It will be a lot more technical and faster. We’re going to use a lot of effects and cinematics this time around. It’s still kind of a work in progress at the moment.”
Right now, band members are writing random lyrics for every song. Ideas for the lyrics have come from movies, video games, or from various articles. The band stays away from doing anything political and focuses on theoretical stories or concepts.
“Usually, the music comes before the lyrics, but with this concept album, we’re trying to almost score the music to the lyrics, so we’re taking more of a cinematic soundtrack approach to it,” Mansfield said. “We’re going to be scoring music to the lyrics. Right now, we’re still coming up with a song concept idea and the lyrics for it.”