The Albums That Made Me
OBSCURA
Cosmogenesis (2009) “Something people were not used to”
THIS MONTH
Jeroen Paul Thesseling
Experimental fretless meets metal in the capable hands of this Dutch bassist. These five albums tell his story. rmed with a fretless seven-string Warwick bass, the Dutch musician Jeroen Paul Thesseling has decades of experience with the death metal bands Obscura and Pestilence, as well as his own solo albums. He began his musical endeavors as a violinist before picking up the bass at the age of 16. From there, he studied 10
at music college in the Netherlands, and joined Pestilence, with whom he made his first recordings. Thesseling’s parents were big fans of baroque music, which the bassist credits as an influence on his understanding of harmony, chord structure and counterpoint. He also studied jazz bass, and continued to explore the world between the
frets. Indeed, those frets were soon obsolete: He switched to fretless in order to explore different tone systems. Thesseling constantly challenges his own technical and musical skills while always keeping the function of the bass in mind: As a result, his basslines are demanding. Here, he talks us through five significant albums from his career.
“This was the first album I recorded with Obscura. You could see it as the brutalsounding part of the band, but at the same time it’s progressivesounding. Bass had an important role in the compositions. It took me a lot of time to create the bass arrangements and make sure that there was something different going on—something people were not used to in metal at that time. I tried to work a lot with melody, as well as the functional role of the bass in the band. “Before this album, I was very much involved with flamenco and world music. On this album there are definitely some ethnic influences. I used to play with a flamenco ensemble in the Netherlands; the bass has a percussive and melodic role, going together with the guitar melodies. You can hear it most obviously in ‘Orbital Elements’— there’s a bass solo and there’s a kind of Moorish, flamenco feel to it, along with many slides and overtone slides. That was all very subconscious: It was not forced in any way. I grew up playing violin on a classical scholarship, learning about counterpoint, harmonic structure, chords and progressions, so when I switched to bass and metal and rock, I studied jazz bass as well, and then joined Pestilence, a progressive death metal band.”
