SW: I was looking into the band's history and I noticed you guys had a lot of strange physical injuries. Were most those injuries acquired when you were working other jobs?
MH: Pretty much. I mean, we had a lot of accidents. The worst time was between '92 and '95. It started out with Fredrick, our lead guitar player cutting off his fingertip working in carpentry. He cut his fingertip off and they had to literally sew it back on. Another incident was when Tomas hurt himself...two times actually: First, he split one of his fingers, then he f**ked his hand up with the tendons. Then we went on this tour and Peter, our former bass player, got sick and had to leave the band. I mean, for us it's all natural, but if you were to compare it with a lot of other bands, yeah, we're injured quite a lot. I guess we're clumsy.

SW: That's amazing. The injury to Fredrick, is that on the hand that he uses for the fret?
MH: Yeah, that's what makes it amazing. But, it took some time for him to adjust. I mean, you can imagine...having one of your fingers, I think it was his ring finger, cut-off. The tip, having to sew it back and all, pretty much relearning how the hand works. Yeah, I really think he made a really strong effort to pull that off.

SW: You play custom eight-string guitars as well. Is this the first album you've used these on?
MH: Yeah. The whole "Nothing" album started brewing, and we had some ideas about doing an album with pretty much all bass guitars. We really needed something to add to our sound. We thought we were going to renew ourself in a way. When that idea came up, we tried it out and it sounded excellent. That actually spurred a lot of the song writing process for the whole "Nothing" album. We got a second wind so to speak. We got inspired. And that's the only reason we pulled it off. We had a tight schedule being on the Ozzfest and all.

SW: Was it difficult to adjust to playing with the extra string?
MH: [Laughs] To tell you the truth, yes and no. We don't really know yet 'cause we did the whole album on one prototype and that guitar really didn't work out that well. So we had to struggle to pull off playing the parts on the album. So the real eight-strings are not arriving until we get back home. So, rehearsing together as a band and really playing in a live situation, we still need to figure that out.

Click Here For MESHUGGAH Interview with Marten Hagstrom Page 3