I’ve never had the chance to meet Daren “Klank” Diolosa personally, but have followed his career over the years in his early bands such as, Circle of Dust and Argyle Park and his current band Klank. The style of music he plays, is an often misunderstood sub-genre of heavy metal, even by metal fans.
Klank was kind enough to take a little time to talk about this style and a little about their new album:
Me: First question is, for those who aren’t familiar with the style of music you play, what is it usually called and what are the influences?
Klank: Well we’ve always considered ourselves Electronically Infused Metal. KLANK is where the mosh pit meets the dance floor. In the past we have been referred to as Industrial, Electronic, and Dance Metal.
Between Pat, Eric and myself we have a vast variety of influences. Depeche Mode, Machine Head, God Lives Underwater. Ministry, Old School Thrash, Kings X. So many names come to mind.
Me: There’s always been something I like about this style of music. I remember the band you were involved in called Argyle Park and something about the electronic/metal sound just gets into my head and heart.
When it come to the electronic sounds, do you all use keyboards, or is it some sort of effect pedals?
Klank: Well that depends actually. We use lots of old school analog synths and keyboards to make sounds plus Pat, our guitarist, programmer guru extraordinaire, has lots of cool outboard gear as well that is used to make, shape and manipulate all kinds of sounds and noises.
We’re really big on taking all forms of noises, sounds and whatnot and altering them and essentially weaving them into the foreground of our sound.
Me: So you use a bunch of different things to get the sound. I get it.
I’m sure you’ve been asked this many times before, but I’ll ask again for my 3 readers (haha): Why the name Klank, any story or meaning behind it?
Klank: When I was on tour with my old band Circle Of Dust in Virginia, I was running around the promoters house playing with his little boy. One of his friends as a joke was acting like he was gonna trip me. Being as I was the token metal head in the band, our drummer Jay said, “hey man you can’t trip him…. He’s so metal that he’ll KLANK when he hits the ground”. After that, every time I took a step around the guy’s house, they were all calling me KLANK as a joke and it just seemed to stick.
Me: Haha…that’s pretty funny. I have in my cd collection and on my i-pod the Circle of Dust “Brainchild” album and I still enjoy playing it often.
Why is it, do you suppose, that bands such as Klank and/or CoD are not considered metal, when they clearly have a metal sound to them?
Klank: Well we’ve always considered ourselves Electro-Metal / Industrial. People get way too lost and carried away with all these genres, sub genres and labels these days. We’ve always had the electronics very prevalent in our sound and I think that’s why people don’t want to just refer to us as metal.
Me: In one of my earliest blog posts, I made fun of many of these sub genres, I mashed them into one long word. I get tired of all the different names and categories.
Now tell me, what’s going on with the new album?
Klank: The new album is called RISE. We are presently in the mixing phase for it and we’re pretty stoked to how it’s coming along so far. We have 10 songs and we’ve been basically taking our time with this one.
It definitely has all the key elements of a KLANK release. It’s heavy, dancy, electronic and really melodic at some points. We’re pretty stoked at how it’s sounding sonically so far.
Well sir, I wanted to say thanks for taking the time to do this interview with me.
Any parting shots??
Klank:
http://twitter.com/KlankNation
http://myspace.com/KlankNation
http://youtube.com/therealklank
https://soundcloud.com/klanknation
saullular 
I’ve never heard of any of Klank’s bands, but I’ve heard of most of the influences he named. So, perhaps I will look into them!
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Yeah, I highly recommend Klank. Really good electronic metal, a bit like Rob Zombi, but they have their own flair, if you will
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I think you sent me a Circle of Dust myspace link once… I gotta see if anything got licenced in Russia at last.
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