BYZANTINE INTERVIEW
April 30, 2004

Ed Martin for Prophecy21.com: How's the tour been going so far?
Chris Ojeda Vocals/Guitar for Byzantine: Actually we're not on tour yet, we haven't landed one yet, but on June 15th we start our first tour with Prong. We go from Little Rock, Arkansas to up the East Coast on out to Wisconsin.

P21: Are you a fan of Prong?
CO: When I was growing up, when I was like young young, Prong was huge. I waslike a skateboarder and I used to listen to Prong all the time. I'm still abig fan, I mean I don't like buy their shit, but it'll be a good tour tostart on.

P21: What do you like about playing a big show like this, as compared to asmaller one?
CO: The energy is a lot more intense. You get the sea of black shirts andit kinda gets you all crazy. You get to be exposed to a much wider audiencethen you do playing a small crowd.

P21: What do you dislike about shows like this?
CO: Not a lot of set up time, no sound check, that kinda sucks.

P21: Whats your favorite part about being on tour?
CO: Hmm, my favorite part... Not being home. Not working my day job, that'smy favorite part.

P21: What is your day job?
CO: Actually I have two, during the day I work for a law firm and duringthe night I deliver pizzas. The good thing is both jobs are cool with this.They're like go ahead go play.

P21: What do you usually do to kill time on the road?
CO: We play chess. We have a magnetic chess board, so we have big chesstournaments. We usually just sit there and bullshit. I usually read themap I like to know where the hell we're at.

P21: What bands have you been listening to lately?
CO: Lately, I've been digging on the new All That Remains. I've been goingback and listening to my old Meshuggah, Destroy Erase Improve. Other thenthat I've been listening to a lot of Bjork.

P21: What were your influences on the new album?
CO: We started listening to old stuff like Forbidden, Exhorder, Testament,Fear Factory and that kind of got us in the mind frame of what we needed todo for the album. So that kind of helped us in being able to do what weneeded to do.

P21: How long have you been in bands?
CO: Well we'll give away my age here, I'm 29, and I've been playing since Iwas 17, so I can't add. That's a lot of years... umm 12 years. Probably liketen of those years were shitty bands.

P21: What's your favorite song on the new album?
CO: My favorite song we don't ever fucking play. My favorite song is thelast song it's called The Filth of Our Underlings. Its just me and thisbuddy of mine we're doing this vocal harmony I'm doing the evil, he's doingthe good. He's doing high, I'm doing the screaming. It's kind of cool.

P21: What's your favorite song to play live?
CO: My favorite song to play live is Hatfield just because the crowd alwaysdigs it everyone knows what the hell we're doing. That and I really digStick Figure.

P21: What band are you most looking forward to seeing at this show?
CO: Arch Enemy, she's hot. I've never seen them before and I'm a big fanof the Amott brothers. One of them was in Carcass, which was the band thatgot me started playing. Machine Head, but I've seen them a couple of times. And All That Remains.

P21: What bands would you like to tour with in the future?
CO: Lamb Of God. There are buddies, they got us signed pretty much. Wehang out with them all the time. I think hopefully at the end of the yearwhen they do a headlining tour they'll take us out and we'll drink a lot ofbeer.

P21: If you guys were going to do a cover what song would you want it tobe?
CO: We've actually talked about this we worked out Testament's ThePreacher. So either Testament or a Wrathchild America cover because they'rea couple of guys from West Virginia and that's where we're from and we'rebig fans of 'em.

P21: How'd you come up with the title of the album?
CO: We had stupid titles, but then our street team guy, his name's BitchBoy, which is a stupid name, he said, "Why don't you name it after one ofthe lyrics off the album?" So he gave us some and The Fundamental Componentwas one that was from Slipping On Noise that came rigtht out. We we're alljust like yeah that's cool. It kinda has that this is a fundamentalcomponent of your CD collection, you've got to get it going for it.

P21: How'd you decide on the name of the band?
CO: We were looking through a thesaurus for a synonym of complicated andByzantine came up so I started studying it. I found out it was an empirethat came after the Roman Empire that was really complicated with theirjudicial system, so that fit the band. What better to name a band then afallen empire and you can play on words with that really good.

P21: Thanks, is there anything you want to add?
CO: Come see us on tour, buy the god damn album, Byzantine1.com, and freeThe West Memphis Three.