By Sonia Schnee | Posted Monday, August 23, 2021

While Hurricane Henri raged outside on the evening of August 21, Northern NJ prog-rock band -cideways was cozied up at Backroom Studios in Rockaway with a select group of fans as it hosted its long-awaited album/music film release show.

As the group’s Facebook event page describes:

‘PORTAL’ is a 9-song instrumental prog-rock album with an accompanying music short film that takes viewers on an audio-visual adventure through space and time over the course of 48 minutes […]
-cideways is the brainchild of guitarist Dominick DeNegri, who was tragically taken from us a few years ago. After Dom's passing, bassist Joshua Sigmund, guitarist Greg Miller, and drummer Darren Kelly vowed to finish what Dom started. Finally, we are proud to release that vision.

I spoke with bassist/video editor Joshua Sigmund during the final days of PORTAL’s production to learn about the story behind the band, their creative process, and how they’ve chosen to honor their late band member, Dom.

Don’t forget to check out the full audio/visual experience by watching the YouTube video above, as well as checking out Spotify and other streaming platforms.

**Tell us about PORTAL and the audio/visual journey you’re taking us on.**

The album has 9 songs, whose names create the sentence: “Time Machine In A Black Hole In The Center Of A Spiral Galaxy, We Opened A Portal To Another Place In Another Time, Where We Had Been With All Of Our Friends.” Each song is enhanced with a unique video with imagery that follows its sonic theme, such as a Back to the Future tribute in “Time Machine”, to a tribute to Dom in “Where We Had Been.” There are running easter eggs and hidden foreshadows and connections throughout the short film that really flow when watched sequentially (Keep an eye out for 5 “portal glitches” throughout the film).

The last song, “With All Of Our Friends,” is actually a medley of the other 8 songs, so any given part might feature, for example, a bass part from “In The Center Of” mixed with a synth part from “In Another Time”. That was an interesting creative challenge, as we had to pick out our favorite elements throughout the album, and then transpose them all to the same key and tempo in order for it to sound cohesive.

-cideways band members (from left) Joshua Sigmund, Darren Kelly, and Greg Miller

What is the origin story of -cideways, and what has the writing process been like for PORTAL?

-cideways is the brainchild of Dominick DeNegri, who started the band more than five years ago, with guitarist Greg Miller. Over the years, -cideways went through two bass players before I joined after meeting Dom at a party, and a few months later, we replaced drummer Brian Pedersen with Darren Kelly.

By that point, we were sounding really tight and we were really excited about working on this album. Then one night, Dom is heading home in an Uber and started to feel sick. He told the driver to pull over and the driver pulled over, but not far enough. Dom got out of the car on the wrong side and got hit by a passing car. I get a call the next morning from Greg saying, "Dom's gone."

After losing Dom, we decided — Greg, myself, and Darren — that we're going to finish this album with the songs we had been working on, and then the band would be over and we'd move on to something else because there's so much of Dom in the music, and Greg, to his great credit, recorded Dom's guitar parts pretty accurately to how he originally wrote them (even the lines we didn’t love… well, some of them haha).

So that was two and a half years ago, and so we've just been working, working, working on this thing, meticulously composing every note, every beat, every running theme.

We had gotten as far as tracking the bass and drums for the first 8 songs, but then COVID hit, and everything just kind of came to a halt. While I kept myself busy listening to the demos of the songs over and over and over again and coming up with ideas for the videos, Greg spent the pandemic focusing on upping his audio production skills, and he got really, really good at it. So while I thought we were dead in the water, he'd actually been working on the songs. One day a few months ago he invites me over, and surprises me with really great-sounding cuts of the songs. We were back on track!

How would you describe your sound?

It's riffy and hard without being just noise. It's also super melodic and dynamic and dance-y enough that even if you don’t typically listen to this type of progressive instrumental music, I like to think that it's approachable to everybody. Really, it’s just fun music that I think everyone from music theory junkies like myself to casual listeners hopefully will enjoy.

Every song’s a little different. For example, the first track, “Time Machine” is a pretty straight-forward rock song with a mid-song twist. The third song, “In The Center Of,” contains heavy riffs that are as hard as almost anything else out there (again, without being what I just call “noise”), while the sixth song, “To Another Place,” is a complex melodic composition featuring orchestral parts that create a lot of emotion, especially for an instrumental song. Then that song is followed by what I call a “palette cleanser” in “In Another Time,” which is a straight-up dance song that I’d like to hear in a club one day.

Song 8, which is "Where We Had Been," is based around this one riff that was the last thing Dom wrote. We hadn’t even begun to write that song when he was killed, so we decided to make it a very short song with the riff reverbing through the whole thing. It's kind of a somber end to the album before you hit the very upbeat ninth song, which is the medley “With All Of Our Friends.” (In fact, the first thing you hear is an uplifting and triumphant 5-note descending major scale, which is a direct contrast to the end of “Where We Had Been,” which ends with a sad 5-note descending minor scale that literally collapses on itself before flatlining.)

We wanted to take people on an emotional yet fun adventure through space and time, and we hope people get as much out of it as we put into it.

Why did you decide to make music videos for all the songs?

We decided to make videos because we wanted to keep people’s attention through 48 minutes of non-vocal, relatively complex music. Speaking to the other musicians out there, I’m sure everyone has experienced trying to show a friend something you’re working on, handing them headphones and asking for just 5 minutes of undivided attention, only to have them – best case scenario – interrupt the flow after 30 seconds to say “hey that’s cool.” So I realized we needed to have some sort of visual element to both make the music a little more approachable and to help people focus on it.

Over not too much time, what started as some broad ideas for videos turned into this detailed thematic music film that really helps tell the story of not only PORTAL, but -cideways as well.

There’s a lot of nostalgia in there (including some… tributes, let’s say… to old movies that resulted in us not being able to monetize the video on YouTube, but we’re fine with that), as well as a good amount of behind-the-scenes clips from the life of -cideways.

How long did it take you to edit all these videos?

Good question… when I get really passion-focused on something, it's like time doesn't really count or matter. Ten hours of editing on one video will go by and I’ll say, "Oh, look at that, it's done." But then I'll come back the next day after taking some notes and find things I want to change. Sometimes I’d spend a whole day trying out an idea that for whatever reason didn’t work and just throw that away. But just like the album, which Greg was working on while I was making the videos, at one point, we had to cap it and just say “after this, it’s done.” So we set ourselves a firm deadline by scheduling the album release party, and of course we ended up making final edits to both the music and film only hours before showtime!

The name of your band, -cideways. Is there a story behind the name and the spelling and the origin of that?

Yeah. So that's all on Dom. Think about it as the suffix, so sui-cide, homi-cide, regi-cide, infanti-cide, all those things like that, so it's (hyphen)-cideways. It's a little Emo for me, but Dom was pretty Emo haha.

But really, -cideways has its own history that's bigger than anyone in it, which is pretty interesting to be a part of. There have been seven people who have come and gone through the band, and more have been auxiliary to it, so yeah, it's been quite the ride and we’re just so happy it’s done so we can move on to something new finally.

Tell us about the album cover.

It’s based on this drawing of a portal over the ocean that Dom drew, and at some point it just became the cover. There's always been this kind of “space and time” theme so it really fit.

How do you feel about everything coming to an end — or a beginning, for some people who this is going to be completely new to?

I'm really excited for people to hear the album and see the film. We’re really happy with how it sounds and we’re really happy with how the videos look. We've been working on this thing for so long, it's just crazy to think that it's finally done. Darren, Greg, and I are really looking forward to playing new music together and not these 9 songs that we've been working on for more than three years. The absolute last riff on “With All Of Our Friends” is a teaser from the first song of the next project that the three of us are working on, Clever Monkey. So after about 6 minutes of familiar melodies, we leave you with something to look forward to, hopefully as much as we are.