Llexi Leon: Not too bad. Not too bad. Been busy as usual. And what's it like at your end?

M: It's the middle of the afternoon and it's pouring. (laughing)

LL: Where are you, anyway?

M: We're located in Wilmington, Delaware. You probably haven't heard of it. We're by Philadelphia.

LL: No, I know Delaware. I don't know where you are in Delaware, but I know it.

M: Okay, cool. Well, some people in America think that Delaware is a town in Pennsylvania, and not actually a state, so you have one up on them. (laughing) First off, were you a musician first, or did drawing get you into music?

LL: Oh, no. Well, I was a musician first, but I was reading comics and anime when I was you know, eight and ten years old, but I wasn't drawing or writing them or anything like that. I just enjoyed it when I was much younger.

M: What sort of comics did you read?

LL: Originally American comics, actually. All the staple stuff that's still going strong now. Things like the Silver Surfer and The X-men that are all big again now a days.

M: Are you still an avid reader of comics?

LL: Well, no, I kind of grew out of it when I was thirteen or fourteen. More recently I was sort of inspired to get back into it, and I must say that I'm quite impressed by how the writing has come on in comic books. They've got some pretty serious writing talents these days. They're not writing books for just kids anymore.

M: How did you get into music?

LL: Well, that's a good question. I'm not sure…I sort of picked up the electric guitar, as most kids do, when I was about thirteen or so, having just got out of comics and things like that. I probably got into heavy metal as most sort of angsty teenagers do. I guess I picked up the electric guitar, and I just wanted to follow Metallica and I learned all their stuff. I think from then, professionally speaking, I had a guitar tutor that once I reached a certain stage he started passing on jobs he didn't want to do to me. I started doing session work and recording work for other people. I learned a lot about recording that way and eventually kind of got quite tired of recording stuff for other people. Pop it's all quite samey and I wanted to do something more experimental, and that's how I started on what I've been doing.

M: Do you play any other instruments?

LL: Yeah, I mean on the record you'll hear everything from violin, piano, and guitar and that's all me. I play everything on it, but my main instruments are guitar, piano, and violin in that sort of order. I dabble in base and drums and all that, but that's why on the first CD it's mainly quite repetitive on the drums and base parts because I was kind of dabbling in that at the time. On this CD, the listener can look forward to a rather improved technique and more progressive rhythm style with the new stuff.

M: Is drawing something you've always been interested in as well?

LL: Yeah, I mean, I'm actually… It's depreciating, but I think I'm a rubbish artist, really. I like to get my ideas down on paper. I have a very clear vision of characters and locations and the way things should look and I try and get that down as best I can, and then I collaborate with more serious professionals and artists to bring that to life to the standards that I'm happy with and that I would be happy to share with other people.

M: What gave you the idea behind the concept of Eternal Descent to combine music and comics?

LL: There is kind of a purposeful moment when I was doing some stuff for commercials. I don't even know what it was anymore, but there were explosions and I think it was a car thing. I was doing the strings, and the orchestration if you will, to these explosive kind of sound effects, and we had these big explosions going on, you know surround sound, and I was just adding all of these strings to it, and it just sounded really epic. There was a story in there, and in a sort of way it was conjuring up imagery in my head just from hearing it play back on the monitors. I was like this is a pretty cool vibe that you get such a visual response in your head just from the audio. You know there's no one saying anything, there's no kind of direct "This is what's happening," but I had a picture and I thought that I should do something with that and play around with that more.

M: I noticed that the music itself is not just a soundtrack, but that it helps to tell the story. Where did your ideas for the story come from?

LL: I 'm not sure. (laughing) It's probably a combination of all the things I've assimilated over the years. The story has a lot of kind of trademark elements of comic books that I enjoyed, and the films that I've enjoyed, but at the same time it doesn't… you know there's no plagiarism that's going on, but there's a kind of influence. Things like the movie The Crow is an influence. Like the comic character Spawn, he's an influence. Even the Silver Surfer is an influence. There are aspects, elements of him, in my main character even though they're totally different. I think it's definitely much like the music. It's an amalgamation of kind of all sorts of stuff and all different types of mediums.

M: I read that both your hero's Serian and the villain Loki are based on yourself. What characteristics do you feel that you share with them?

LL: Well, it's kind of like, if you ever see yourself as a hero, you're like "Oh, it would be cool to have this power or whatever." I think that the good guy, Serian, is kind of how I would be. He has the same personality as me as well. He's quite straightforward, a kind of carbon copy of me, but taken to new levels of a superhero with these fantastic abilities. And then you've got Lokki, who's the bad guy, and that plays on more of a twisted sense of humor which he shares with me.

M: Where did you find your vocalist Elysha West?

LL: Elysha is married to the first guy who taught me to play guitar, and I met her that way. I've known her for really a decade now, and she's a fantastic vocalist. I mean you can just play anything at her. I often start with the vocal parts, because I write them all, and I'll just play the solo on guitar and I'm like "It goes like this" and she'll just sing it right back. A couple of takes and it's done, and it's just fantastic. I have known her for nearly a decade now, and she is quite a fantastic vocalist.

M: Because you've known her would you say that's helped your working relationship?

LL: Oh yeah! It really makes everything out there much better communication then you would if you just got a session vocalist in or you were trying to start from scratch with someone. The guy I record with when we're actually doing the sessions I've known him for about eight years as well, and so it's a really quite tight unit. We can get a lot done quite quickly.

M: How is it been working with the anime artist? Do you fell like they properly capture your vision?

LL: Mostly. You won't have seen the stuff, because we haven't released it. I'm working with a guy at the moment called, Jason Metcalf. He's been on the outskirts of the comic business for a while now. He's been doing comic stuff for about ten years, and he's definitely bringing things to life the way they should look. There's going to be some stuff coming out. We're working on a single for May-ish and that's going to be a cover of the Phantom of the Opera with a few other bits and pieces where it will almost be like a parody. We'll have the characters taking on the roles as if they were in the phantom and the art work for that is just fantastic. He's just got it spot on. It's also the same guy who's doing the comic book we're working on, which will be way in the distance when that gets put to press, because that's a long process. He's doing amazing work and we get to communicate a lot. We talk on the phone or by email and send stuff back and forth, and it's just a very easy process. He really understands where I'm coming from, and it all looks great.

M: Do you feel that the album has a target market?

LL: I don't think the CD has a specific target market. As you've probably heard it's quite unusual. It was a lot more of an experiment than anything else. I think it's a cool CD, but if I was going for like "I want to do a metal-core kind of album" or "I want to do a jazz album" or whatever I could have just done it and aimed it at whoever. But this is something that I really wanted to do for myself, and I think some people will get this. People who are into fantasy stuff and comics and animie as well more progressive music. There's a whole spectrum of people who have found us on the web as well as bought the album and said "Oh, I really like this." And when you actually go and check out these people, because I can be quite hands on with that, especially when people come by through MySpace, and I check them out, and you've got people listening to such a diverse array of styles or people into anime or people into comics it's a big range.

M: How do you plan on going about doing a live stage performance?

LL: It is something in the pipeline, but there's a lot going on really. It's something I would like to do, but it's not exactly easy because there are so many instruments on the CD and then they were all performed by myself. So if I was going to do it live I would have to hire some people and collaborate with them to bring that to life. But certainly, to the point of view of what would make it different from a regular band, we'd get some massive projectors rigged up and have all of the artwork hacked about. I'm planning to eventually do that and then synchronize imagery to the music, and you know when there's an explosion you'll see the explosion.

M: I read that you plan to release a game from the story? Is that true?

LL: Yeah, that's right! We're working on that right now. We are just doing the pitch at the moment. We have had a couple of developers interested, but I am waiting to finalize. The biggest thing I'm working on at the moment is the comic, and I want to kind of finalize publishing for that, and that's going to help us with the negotiations for the game. So that's underway and I've had loads of concept artwork done for that and we're writing the actual gameplay and what's going to happen in the story and hopefully the story will kind of generally reflect that first album. Really a lot of things are coming out now. We're doing this 12 issue arc of comics and we're doing this game and all of this other stuff. It's all going to be coming back to this first album. It's a quite ambiguous and experimental album, and we'll be actually showing people all of the depth in there and all of the kind of hidden meanings in the lyrics and in the sound effects and so on.

M: I have also looked on your official website and your MySpace page. Do you maintain those pages yourself?

LL: Yeah, I do, embarrassingly enough. They look like they haven't really been dealt with properly in a week or so, and the official page is about a month out of date, by now. But yeah it's a lot to deal with. I have a couple of web guys I work with when it comes to more serious coding, like that, but on the whole I maintain and I try to communicate with fans regularly and that sort of thing,. With MySpace there's like twenty-two thousand people on there, so going on all of the time is quite hard.

M: What music are you currently listening to now?

LL: Quite a variety of stuff. I mean really I stick to classic stuff, mostly because it just helps me relax. Often I don't listen to contemporary music, because I find if I listen to what other people are doing then it's too easy to be subconsciously taking that when I sit down and pick up the guitar. There are lots of cool bands out there, doing awesome stuff, but I'm trying to stay away from that and listen to classical stuff and listen to a lot of film soundtracks at the same time. A big one fro me is the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. I listen to that quite a bit. (laughing) I still play a lot of metal guitar, but it's more just kind of improv based upon eighties stuff that I enjoyed, and I put it together myself rather than listening to current bands.

M: Have you ever considered a career in something other than music?

LL: Surely. I quite like the idea of getting all this Eternal Decent stuff out there, because I kind of artistically direct everything, if you will. I'm in charge of the comic, and I write the comic, and I do all of the production on the music, and I'm kind of heading the artistic direction on the game. Once that's all done, I quite like for people to think "You, know that was a pretty cool brand this Eternal Decent label. Maybe we could get this guy in to do something with whatever kids TV properties they had in mind." I'd like to do that kind of work.

M: Is there anything else from Eternal Descent that we should expect in the future that we haven't already talked about?

LL: There is all sorts of stuff. I mean we've covered the comic, and the game, and the Phantom of the Opera single, and that's kind of the major stuff. There is a second album in the pipeline as well. That's going to be like one big long epic, and more than the conventional album. That's going to be quite interesting. We're going to have one track that's about forty minutes long kind of like a symphony, and it's going to have movement. It's going to be accompanied by comics and there will be character voiceovers as well as just lyrics. The actual characters have voices now. I do some of the voices and have a couple of other people doing voice acting, and so there's actually going to be a sort of dramatization going on and the words you hear, the script, will be acted out in the music and will be reflected in the speech bubbles in the comic. It'll be pretty cool.

M: Yeah! That sounds pretty interesting. Do you have any ideas for different projects in the future that don't involve Eternal Descent?

LL: Not at the moment, no (laughing). I think if I could make it work, I have a good few years ahead of me putting it all together, and then I might think about something else.

M: Can you tell us one interesting fact about yourself that our readers might not already know?

LL: Good question. I don't know. (laughing) what kinds of things do you want to know?

M: Just something cool, something funny about yourself. Something a little personal.

LL: I'm quite dull really. I spend most of my time working on music. I suppose one interesting fact might be that I was on the athletics team for my county here in England. Despite being a geek, I quite like running and swimming.

M: Well, that's interesting. Alright then, thank you so much for talking to me. We wish you the best in the future, and have a great evening!

LL: Thank you very much as well. Take care.

M: Bye.