IRECENTLY THE MEMBERS OF FOLD ZANDURA, WHO JUST HAPPEN TO BE THE SAME LADS THAT CREATED THE INDUSTRIAL GROUND BREAKERS MORTAL YEARS AGO, CALLED THE I-REV HOTLINE TO CLEAR UP A FEW THINGS. THE CURRENT STATE OF MORTAL, THE FUTURE OF FOLD ZANDURA, AND THE MEANING OF THE NAME FOR STARTERS. ALTHOUGH FOLD ZANDURA WOULD BE CLASSIFIED AS MODERN ROCK AND NOT NECESSARY INDUSTIRAL, THIS WAS THE SECTION THAT HAD ROOM FOR A LAST MINTURE INTERVIEW. SO DEAL WITH IT!
 

Most folks look back on their college years as a time of expanding their intellectual horizons; a time of examining different lifestyles and in some cases, cramming enough useless knowledge into their heads to help them make a decent career choice. For Jyro Xhan and Jerome Fontamillas of Fold Zandura, college meant two things-the beginning of an 11-year partnership that's still blossoming ("Some days," Jerome recalls with a laugh, "it seems like we've been partners forever!"), and the first steps of a musical quest for the perfect pop song. "Actually," remembers Jyro, "I've been writing pop songs since I was in the sixth grade. Anything we can do to get closer to The Beatles sonically and musically, the happier I'll be."

The first musical entity for which Jerome and Jyro became well-known was Mortal. Jyro explained that Mortal's intense industrial sound was partly based on the equipment available to him and Jerome as well as the duo's admitted musical limitations. "Industrial music was easy to do with the kind of recording gear we had. I wasn't a guitar player at all-I'm still not much of one. Barre chords-which is what you mostly play in industrial-are much easier to play. And I could barely sustain a singing voice, so screaming was a lot easier as well. So things seemed to point in that direction for Mortal."

Even though Mortal became one of the first and best-known industrial groups in Christian music, Jyro says he and Jerome have always experimented with different vocal and musical approaches. "I consider myself a piano player before anything. It's my main instrument. A couple of the tunes that Fold Zandura does now, I actually wrote before Mortal. And some of the songs we're writing now for our next album are much more melodic." Just prior to the formation of Fold Zandura, Jerome and Jyro completed two final and musically divergent Mortal projects with long-time engineering partner Mark Rodriguez. "Pura," explains Jyro, "was this ethereal praise album that we've always wanted to do. The [5 Minute Walk] Mortal album was something that we wanted to do to help [5 Minute Walk president] Frank Tate and he wanted to do to help us, so we both really benefitted from that. It contained some left-over songs that we didn't want lost; we really wanted them out there. We also tried to launch Xhan Records, our own little label, at that time." Jerome adds that "'King Flux' and 'Fray Lagoon' from the Mortal album were songs that were around when Andy Prickett [of Prayer Chain] first started working with us. 'King Flux' was actually recorded as a Fold Zan demo. Andy played all our early shows. He'll always be a mentor. Even on the new stuff, he helped us with sounds. You can hear his guitar ideas on the Fold Zan indie CD."

Like a lot of the best musical adventures, Jerome says that Fold Zandura started without a lot of preconceived notions about what should happen next. "The group actually became Fold Zan when Frank Lenz joined in April of 1995. We were just working on songs for awhile and decided to do some demos for ourselves to see if we could start a band. We didn't know for sure how these songs would sound until we tried them with a band. Plus, we didn't want people to say that we were just changing our name because we felt it was a whole new thing when Frank joined. Frank also sings, which adds a new dimension and makes it feel more like a band."

Part of the texture which makes the music of Fold Zandura so interesting is the group's judicious use of sound effects and samples, both on album and on stage. But unlike many groups, Fold Zandura doesn't disguise a lack of musical ability with tape loops. "We knew that, on stage, we'd have three people trying to do the job of seven," admits Jyro. "Jerome and Frank are really the only people I felt I could trust, musically. Andy Prickett too, but he couldn't go on tour. It just seemed the natural thing to do to put stuff on tracks and use samples. Plus, when we were first trying to formulate our sound, it was the samples that really made it different from anything else we'd ever done. We knew we had to incorporate that into our live performances." Jyro feels that approach has helped make Fold Zandura a very powerful and tight live unit; a band that he says continues to evolve. "Jerome is able to concentrate on singing and playing bass, instead of having to cover a number of areas. With Frank, he's the dynamo of the band. His ideas give the songs a different kind of vibe. And the direction that we're taking with the new material is quite different. We want to be a pop band. So, we're all pretty much in tune with that idea, sonically and musically."

Fold Zandura recently signed an agreement with Sub*Lime Records, a modern rock division of Essential Records. The label has scheduled the release of Return, an eight-song CD which contains five songs from the band's limited-edition indie CD and three new songs. Jerome says Fold hopes to re-introduce itself with the new disc. "We only made about 5000 copies of the Fold Zan CD. So the only people that could buy the CD had to pick up copies from our tours and the few stores which carried it. We re-mixed five songs from that CD for this new disc, plus we added an instrumental and two new songs, "Return" and "Forever Throw," that we've been doing live for awhile. But the record company felt it would be essentially a new album to most people."

And what about the name "Fold Zandura," the moniker which has probably attracted more attention to the band than the group's music itself? Simple, says Jyro. "I made up 'Zandura.' We used that name to describe this environment we sometimes reach, on stage or in the studio, where we find ourselves closest to God, close to touching His face. Plus all of us are totally into sci-fi, so 'Fold Zandura' became this actual place, and the band became these characters who inhabited this story about this place. Frank, Jerome and myself all had different roles in a story about this place and the songs became a description of our lives in this place. Hopefully someday we can do a video and show part of how we've imagined this place to be. And we don't mind people wanting to know."

Even though Mortal enjoyed a certain amount of success in its day, many people felt the band never reached its full commercial potential. And even with the excitement Fold Zandura generated before signing to a major label, Jyro says he wasn't sure that the band was going to survive. "In the past year or so, I've been seeking some kind of explanation for what we've been doing. We weren't on any label, we were touring, but just breaking even. We had no sense of where we were going to end up. In anything that we do, we always ask ourselves why we're doing it, what's the goal." Jerome says he feels Fold has persevered "because, over and over, God has proved Himself to be behind what we're doing. Sometimes, when it didn't feel like we should be where we were, from a financial or practical stand-point, or even spiritually, God has always confirmed that we were doing was right. We were at the point, before the agreement with Sub*Lime, where we felt like we might give things a few more months, one more tour, and then re-evaluate. Then Robert Beeson and Essential came along and the Sub*Lime deal happened. We feel like God's hand is in this new venture, or we wouldn't be pursuing it. There's a fine line between self-confidence and arrogance, but we honestly feel we are balanced in that area. If God decides to open the floodgates and allow us to make inroads into the mainstream market, we believe we're ready."

It would seem that in Return, Fold Zandura may have come close to pop perfection, offering an album that resonates with deep spiritual overtones and yet contains enough of a personal connection to the band to attract an audience of non-Christians. In fact, Jyro refers to Return as "a relationship album. There's a strong spiritual presence to the album, without it being along the lines of what people might traditionally be looking for in a Christian album. But I think that makes it all the more powerful. It would be easy to place my Lord's name inside a pop song. But that doesn't mean it's going to be used by the Holy Spirit. Placing a blatant message in a song just to get a certain response is not necessarily the best way of communicating. We want to be a rock band that makes good art, and remains open to God, instead of trying to dictate to the public how we specifically see God. I'd rather my witness be more holistic, involving all of my life."

© 1997 7ball magazine

Interviews

Jerome
Jerome and Jyro
 

Fold Zandura (homepage)