Announcing their decision to disband following the current run of live shows, as of June 23, progressive post-metal titans Isis, responsible for much of the current lay of the extreme metal landscape, will be no more, stating in a press release that “in the interest of preserving the love we have of this band, for each other, for the music made and for all the people who have continually supported us, it is time to bring it to a close. We've seen too many bands push past the point of a dignified death and we all promised one another early on in the life of the band that we would do our best to ensure Isis would never fall victim to that syndrome.”

Speaking hours after the announcement, founding guitarist/vocalist Aaron Turner reassures fans of noodling their way through the cosmos that this far from the end when it comes to the  musicians behind this progressive behemoth.

“As far as a case-by-case basis goes,” starts Turner in measured tones, “[drummer] Aaron Harris: he has been doing more recording, he's done a lot of stuff like demo recordings and also started doing some more polished recordings for other bands so I think he'd going to try and persue that end, and I know he's got a couple of different musical ideas and collaborations in mind, but I don't know if anything is firmed up at this point. [Keyboardist] Bryant is obviously doing Red Sparowes, they just released a new album and went on tour in the US, starting in Europe in the Fall, and he's also been doing – I guess you could call it a solo project – called Taiga. They did one record last year and I think he just completed another record. [Bassist, also in Red Sparowes] Jeff did the Spylacopa EP almost two years ago and I think he's talking about continuing to make music, not necessariloy with Spylacopa, but with one of his collaborators from that project, John LaMacchia [of Candiria] and I think he's gonna be doing some stuff on his own also. [Guitarist] Mike is pretty heavily invested in [ambient side-project] MGR, he just did a soundtrack for a Belgian film by a director who did a movie called 'Ex Drummer' that Isis had a song on the soundtrack of a couple of years. I think aside from having done that music as a soundtrack, he's also going to reformat it in some way for an album based around that. He's definitely fully invested in that, so there's no shortage of activies involved.”

Having released five albums, four Terrorizer Album Of The Year contenders and one Terrorizer Album Of The Year, across their thirteen years, including five live records and assorted splits, EPs and remixes, Isis have a body of work that would satisfy even the most demanding perfectionist to ever hover over an instrument.

“It depends who you ask in the band,” he muses, quick to reinterate that the band had long since exceeded their modest goals, “as it was stated in the press release I don't think any of us had any grand ambitions about what we wanted to do with the band in the beginning. I don't think we had anything in our minds other than being able to record in a more focused fashion than we had with a lot of bands, maybe doing a little bit of touring when possible, so those amibitions were certainly fulfilled early on. Other things happened along the way that I guess were things we hoped 'might' happen, but weren't necessarily things we strove for; not just doing an EP but actually doing a number of albums, a catalogue. A lot of the bands that I've been initially inspired by with Isis were bands like Godflesh, Swans, Melvins, who even at that point had lengthy discographies and over the course of those discographies went through a very noticeable evolution, so I think that was something that was really important to me in terms of what we're able to do with Isis: we made five albums in total and we made some pretty significant steps in our evolution through the course of those albums, so that definitely had a big impact on me as a participant in the band.”

Although a band who have affected so many with their gentle thunder, that perfect 3am tonic, and inspired many a publication to greater fits of reverential hyperbole, for Aaron, the deeply personal satisfaction he takes from his band's career is the one which is ultimately the most rewarding.

“I've very often tried not to think of it in terms of how we were viewed externally,” he explains. “I think the main thing for me was my own connection to what we were doing. Certainly the people who listened to Isis were a very important facet of what we did, and some of the best shows we played were those where I felt a really strong connection with the audience, but when I think back on moments when there was something that had happened that was really gratifying to me, often it had to do with the completion of music that we were working on, whether it was in the rehersal space or we had finished or nearly finished writing a track and I could get an overview of what the song was like, and also the same experience in the studio, coming back and being able to listen to a song from beginning to end and being able to hear parts coming together and feeling like the song had become its own entity, where it had transcended the individual parts that each of us were playing in the process of recording and became its own living thing. I remember specifically feeling that way while working on both 'Oceanic' and 'Panopticon', and the tracks I remember in particular were 'Weight' from 'Oceanic' – Aaron Harris and I had done the basic tracking for that, just the two of us, and once he had put his drumsticks down and I had taken my guitar off, we had that feeling that something really good has happened. It was one of those things too where we just play it from beginning to end without stopping, I can't describe it as anything other than just feeling right. In the sessions for 'Panopticon' we were sitting in the control room listening to the mix, a rough mix, for 'In Fiction'. There's a middle section there where after everyone has sort of been doing their own individual things, we come together collectively and all just play this thing in unison and it felt like everything just fell into the place where it was meant to be.”

2002's 'Oceanic' is largely regarded as THE album, the one that turned heads and put them high on the sonic agenda, but nobody wants a full and complete live to be looked back on as one particular moment destined to make the cut in every classic album feature or 'best of' list from now until the missiles fly. Well, Aaron seems faily pragmatic about it and the way his own slowburning 'Reign In Blood' will be remembered.

“I've always felt a strong connection to all of the albums, but I always realise in my own perception of certain bands that there's often an album in particular that sticks out for me, and it's not always the band's favourite by any means. I do understand why people get attached to certain records and I do feel grateful to the fact that there's a particular record we made that people feel really strongly about, if it happens to be 'Oceanic' than so be it. I will also say that I feel that record was important for us because it was a moment where we broke through this boundary of being more indebted to our predecessors, to becoming more of a distinct entity, so it is a very crucial record in our overall trajectory.”

Now we're at a point where NeurIsis gets used around three times every issue to describe a band traversing along all too familiar ground, have the bearded legions dulled some of the impact and the punctured some of the mystery around what Isis have been doing?

“In the early years we were certainly only one of a few bands that were pursuing this style of music,” he begins after a pause to chew the proposition over, “whatever you might call that. That made it feel like a freer process to a large degree, it's not like we were pioneering territory necessarily but we were free to roam about in a number of directions without bumping up against a number of other bands doing the same thing. Now, I think this is something I personally struggle with, because I feel that in a way, our sound is completely our own but time there are a lot of other bands now that we are cuplable to, at least on a surface level, and it feels more constricting than it did. It feels that we should be able to grow beyond that and become something which extends outside of that realm, and at times I think we are still capable of that, but at the same time to try to move too far out of the parameters that we establish for ourselves would make the band something other than it is supposed to be, and it would also be something that would be really difficult to achieve considering the people involved and considering the fact that areas where we meet in the middle and are able to make music that we're all comfortable with all fall within that spectrum.”