Despite remaining out of the spotlight and largely keeping the curtains drawn beyond his work in a highly private and heavily regarded band, we’ve learned a lot about Justin Chancellor through his 29 years of playing in Tool. His constant stream of riffs and barrages of technical fretboard acrobatics are extraordinary. His propulsive picking speed is as tireless and dexterous as it is precise. And his tone merges a deep, low growl with metallic electricity, conveyed through delays, distortions, wahs, and overdrives. While Tool’s music always keeps their listeners guessing, we’ve come to expect certain things from Chancellor that he’s sure to deliver. But his recent release from his side project, MTvoid, caught us off guard by showing his imaginative writing outside of Tool. Never did we expect to hear him play an upright bass on a record, nor his stream-of-consciousness dabbling over atmospheric synths and layers of plug-ins. He and vocalist/producer Peter Mohamed (Sweet Noise, Serce) exchanged sound files via email during the pandemic lockdown, which gave Chancellor the space to let the sounds truly dictate what the song would be. The result is a seven-song LP that oscillates between dissonant movement and droning intensity. As the follow-up to MTvoid’s 2013 album, Nothing’s Matter, this music shows the duo in a focused space with an evolved sound that they’ve materialized through modern technology — largely home studios and file sharing, given Mohamed’s residence in Poland.  And while Tool is still touring, with talks of the first all-new music since 2019’s Fear Inoculum on the horizon, MTvoid has been at work on their next installment, with most of the songs already worked out. Soon it will be time again for Justin to put down his iconic Wal basses in lieu of his vintage Fenders, Music Man StingRays, and a new Status bass to finish the third chapter of his second musical home. While we’ve come to expect a lot from Chancellor, we won’t even begin to speculate what it will sound like.    Adam Jones and Chancellor How is the current Tool tour going for you?  It’s been amazing. It’s always a bit like this — you write an album then you record an album, and obviously we spend a long time doing this. In those stages you’re trying to get those songs nailed down to where they should be forever. Once you record them, that’s that. We want to develop them as far as they want to go, [but] it’s never the case that that’s the end of its life. We’re playing a lot of songs off the new album and every night it’s a thrill getting better at them and developing them through those little moments where you realize, Oh, that’s how I should have played it. Also, you’re playing them next to songs from the old record, so it gives them a whole different perspective. You have to develop those old songs a little to fit them together with the new stuff. It’s thri