Arif – Bass

Arif Mirabdolbaghi is the bassist and lyricist of Protest the Hero.

Technicality, groove, charisma, literary chops – Arif is one talented dude. His bass skills include but are not limited to pop ‘n slap, finger tapping, thunderous syncopation, and beautiful harmonic-laden melodies. As a lyricist, Arif writes themes that seem to be leagues beyond what most of our intellects can hope to understand, while maintaining a fantastic sense of poetry. I am such a geek for his writing that I’d like to include one of my favourite passages:

In the empty place between better and worse language unravels and irony hurts
In the common place between hunger and thirst,
The words that define us a blessing and curse.
The words that confine the ideas traversed the ear to hear the song without verse,
The sound of the sound of the sound utter first,
The burst into nothing so sudden and soft,
The silence inside you when the music has stopped

Arif Mirabdolbaghi Quotes

On Kezia and concept albums:

I think that when faced with the option of doing a record that is one unit as opposed to ten or twelve independent units, that’s an attractive option for a lot of bands to explore… And that’s why concept albums or “conceptually” based albums in anyway are sprouting up. It’s not that we have to differentiate ourselves from that or shy away from it. Yes, we’ve done a conceptually based album and we’re fine with that, it’s just that people have a very old school way mentality with what a concept album is, an incredibly geeky thing that the band took very, very seriously. At the end of the day, we don’t take ourselves that seriously.

Advice for new bands / artists:

Don’t hop into recording things. The recordings will always come back to haunt you, and you’ll have a core audience that loves them but you, yourself, will hate and despise them. Also, don’t take yourself very seriously, but take your craft very seriously.

Sources:  ThePunkSite

Photo: Carl Fleischer