Yeah, loads. Too many, actually... I've been writing a lot more songs in quite a long time in the past year or so. It's just a matter of finding the discipline to record proper versions of them as opposed to 4-track recordings.

You have quite a thing for 4-track recording...

Yeah, I like the immediacy of it. I've always been attracted to simple machines, in terms of working to record and to document your own music. There's something about the small-ness of it and the small amount of buttons and knobs. It's more personal and less intimidating. You don't have to go through this big ordeal of patching wires and figuring what goes where or how things turn on... or off.

How many musical projects are you involved with?

Too many. I'm doing something called The Octave Museum with this guy called Johnny - he's an amazing musician, great bass player, writes great tunes and the drummer of Scissorfight. It's basically songs I've written that would've gone on to a solo 4-track recording but amplified into a loud band. It's pretty cool.

What about Verge-in, what's the situation there?

Verge-in is the sort of thing that will happen when both Cave In and Converge have something to donate into making something. As of now we've only done one recording and it was of 5 songs and the songs aren't even finished yet and only two of them have been agreed upon as worthy of being released. Writing with 8 other musicians is like being put into a big melting pot of egos, so for that reason I think it's difficult to find enough tunes that please everyone but at the same time; I know that I'm open to the challenge.

What's going on with Cave In and Hydra Head?

Well, we're no longer on RCA. We're basically free agents at this point and can choose whoever we want to release our music so it was a no-brainer decision to do 'Perfect Pitch Black' with Hydra Head because they expressed interest, even before RCA dropped us, that they'd like to release another Cave In record.

What's happening with Cave In, I heard that's Caleb's in LA and JR's in Germany - as a fan I can see it all beginning to dissolve...

Yeah, I can see why it'd appear to be that way. Things have definitely slowed down with the band. We're not the same band that we were 2/3 years ago when we were touring like crazy and busting our asses trying to get everybody to hear our music. I think the idea of trying to stuff ourselves down everybody's throats began to slowly work against us - as a band for our creativity and for our individual love of Cave In. So now that we're not on RCA, we've scaled things down a lot. The band's a lot closer to how things were 5/6 years ago in terms of the structure and that has made everyone involved a bit more exciting to get involved in the future.

Did the whole RCA thing affect you much in terms of losing speed in the band?

Well RCA had only a small part to do with it. In general it was mostly decisions we made ourselves. We chose to sign to a major label. We chose to agree to the terms of doing that, which involves in doing a heavy amount of touring and when you tour a lot you end up playing the same songs over and over ago and it's not particularly inspiring for us, at all. As individuals we're based upon being free spirits, in terms of creating our own music. Now that Cave In is not the main thing in everybody's lives, well, I'm much happier because I have plenty of time to explore all the ideas that my musical imagination can think of.

Will New Idea Society tour again, or was that just a one-off thing?

I don't know. We haven't toured the 'states and the tour that we just did ended up with everybody in high spirits, so the possibility is there but there are no definite plans.

What made you change your vocal style from screaming on the early Cave In stuff to actually singing on recent stuff?

That kind of singing [screaming] didn't come very natural to me. It gave me migraines. There are people who will sing in that style where it's almost as much as a reflex to them as breathing or speaking. It's a very natural and unforced thing. That's one thing that's great about Caleb, he's got a badass voice and it just comes out when he screams. That was just not the case for me. I have more interest in melody where as like the screaming on 'Until Your Heart Stops' - not only can you not really explore melody on that but when you want to, your voice is so shredded, or at least my voice was so shredded, that I couldn't do both, by any means.

What inspired you to first pick up a guitar?

My dad. He played when he was younger and there was always a guitar lying round the house. The guitar that he learnt to play on when he was younger was a '65 Harmony Jaguar. I'd always pick it up and strum the string and tune them but I could never really figure out chords or anything. That way of thinking didn't really click in my head until I took guitar lessons. So I ended up learning guitar on the same guitar that my dad used to learn guitar on when he was younger.

How do you keep your writing to such a high standard, despite all of the projects you're involved with? Does it come naturally to you or do you spend a lot of time working on songs?

As I get older, I've realised that I've put more emphasis into the stff that I write as opposed to the quantity. There are certainly songs that I'll write that come very much on a whim both lyrically and musically and sometimes it'll be beyond elementary - there might be something really special about that sort of child-like spark. It's hard to gauge - when something is so simple and under-developed, but good. It's worth hearing for that reason as opposed to being just a rough draft of something. As you get older that's something that's harder to gauge, you become more accustomed to second-guessing yourself, so that spark of innocence and that un-developed charm becomes something that you're not very confident can exist just on its own. So you revise it and edit. But I try my best to preserve that because that's one of the special things of song writing, being able to capture that childlike notion of discovering something for the first time, falling, seeing, hearing something for the first time.

Anything you can do to trigger those emotions into what you're writing usually leads to good song writing.

How have you found the tour around the UK so far?

It's awesome, man. It's been great. I've had a blast. I was just saying to someone earlier: as a country and a population it's on a lot smaller scale compared to the States - it works to the musicians' or entertainers' advantage because you have all this energy that's compacted into a small area. You can feel that when you play. People are generally more receptive to hear music, watch performances and more appreciative.

Who are your influences?

I'd say initially to start out; Converge was a really big influence on early Cave In. Which you could kind of tell on our early recordings where we kinda ripped them off, err, sort of blatantly? (Laughs) I'd say Giants Chair. Scott Hobart is really one of the most amazing guitar players I've ever heard.

Sonic Youth were a big influence too. When I first heard 'Dirty', I didn't know what to expect but I knew they were important because Nirvana loved them. Whatever Nirvana liked, I thought was important. The first two songs didn't really strike me or if they did, it was in a way I couldn't put my finger on, then 'Theresa's Sound World' came on, it's the third song on the record, and I remember just sitting in my room and it just clicked and I thought, "whoa, this is beautiful, I've never heard anything like this". It's one of my favourite Sonic Youth songs, it has these wonderful blasts of noise and energy for what I guess would be known as the 'choruses' of the song.

Yeah, I really like that record too, it's why DIRTY ZINE is called 'DIRTY' ZINE. My favourite is, agh, I've forgotten what it's called... the one that starts with the harmonics like "chooka-dooka-dooka-dooka" urm...

Oh, yeah! Yeah! 'Drunken Butterfly', man! Yeah! With the riff: "Dum dum chicka-chicka dum dum chicka-chicka" and then goes "DURN!"

Yeah and the "beeaaaawwooooo"

It's awesome, awesome man.

What about Failure as an influence?

Failure for me was like... it gave me the direction to go in. The thing I liked about Failure was that they were full of melodies that weren't obvious but they were catchy. Geometrically speaking, if Nirvana was a square then Failure was... I dunno... a fucking hexagon or something. Or a hexagon on acid...! Really cool obtuse melodies that surprised you in a really rocking way. Magnified is the record that changed my years. I wanted to write melodies that were equally as unpredictable and dark and twisted. It's like the first time I heard 'Moth' - the second song - when that chorus comes in I didn't know what was going to happen. There was always this constant element of surprise that was really attractive to me.

Yeah, I've noticed a lot of similarities between your sound and Failure's. Like when I heard your cover of their song 'Magnified' the only difference I could really pull out was the sound quality.

Oh... yeah, in the band that I was in before Cave In it was worse because I pretty much adopted Ken Andrews' voice. Then there's My Bloody Valentine. Loveless always sounded like a pop record where the master tapes fell into this murky red ocean...

Yeah, it sounds like a cassette player that's gone low on batteries.

Yeah! Playing a tape that's been dubbed over, like, twenty times! It's a beautiful, beautiful record.

When you changed your style from metal (Beyond Hypothermia/Until Your Heart Stops) to, I guess 'space-rock' (Creative Eclipses/Jupiter) you were put up against some criticism from your fans for changing your style to something a lot more 'pussy'-ish, as a band what was that like?

It was exciting for us because it almost felt like we had done something wrong. We had that childlike excitement of throwing a toy truck through a window to see what crazed reaction you can get off from your parents, you know? We kind of got off from pushing people's buttons. But at the same time, we didn't simply make Jupiter for that reason - we passionately put our heart and soul into writing those songs into being the best that they could.

As a musician, is there any sort of permanent path that you're going to stick to in the future?

I think my attitude is to get involved with things for as long as I enjoy them. At the present time, I'm happy doing multiple things and becoming a better musician in doing so. I think that's what becoming a better musician is all about, playing with other people and learning other people's language and the way that they think or speak about language and applying it to their own. I want to keep learning, I want to be the student. Projects come and go but I just want to keep playing and learning and wherever that takes me, I'll be happy to be there.

What are you planning to release soon?

Well I've got to get my ass in gear and finish recording all the songs that I'd like to put on a solo record. At this point it'll be a quadruple album and I don't think anyone wants to hear that or that I'll have the energy to record it! There's the new Cave In record, 'Perfect Pitch Black', I'd like for there to be something else, but we'll just have to see.

Are you happy with the songs that you've got for Perfect Pitch Black?

Yeah, I'm happy with all of it, I really am. It was an interesting time to be writing music. It was like a big 'fuck you' to everything that we had experienced in the years towards the end of our relationship with RCA - it wasn't a direct 'fuck you' to the label or any particular person or situation we were in - in general it was us trying to recapture what we love about our band. It's a very dark and ugly record. But underneath that there are really nice memories of being in the rehearsal space, working on the songs and everybody getting off on what was happening.

Everything that we've decided to be on the record will have been pre-recorded songs that have been floating around on the internet but it will still be a fresh sounding record to people who have heard the demo songs because since then we've gone back, done some work on the songs and added some stuff sonically to the top and in doing so, the whole thing sounds like a whole listening experience, in terms of an album. It will be something new to hear for even the people that have heard the tunes played live or the demo versions.

What 5 bands would you recommend for people in the UK to check out?

Thee Electric Bastards, Scissorfight, Eyes Like Knives, Officer May & Cul De Sac.