During a conversation with Ultimate Guitar's Justin Beckner, Devin Townsend talked about the current state of the music industry, as well as musicians switching to YouTube to spread their work.

UG: Do you have any advice you'd like to hand down to the UG community on how to not get fucked over by this industry? It can be quite a brutal business if you end up learning those lessons the hard way.

Devin: "I'll say this until my dying day and I only have one piece of advice for musicians as they come up. You have to learn to fail efficiently - because you're going to fail. If you are so easily deterred from your vision that the opinions of others and their perceived failings of what you do is such that you can't continue, then it's good to get that out of the way really quickly and know you can't take it.

It's not a macho thing either, it's just that for some people it's not healthy for them to pursue that. For me, I'm sure there is a callus that I have built up around it that makes it marginally easier. But if you can get back up after failing publicly - if the humiliation of the perceived public failure is such that you're afraid of it, you're not going to be able to proceed, you're just not. So learn how to get over it and move on. Forgiving yourself is a huge part of that. Even going back to my time with Steve (Vai), as much as it would be easy to say, I regret this or that... I don't regret it. I just had to recognize its function in my work and in my life and get over. That's the biggest piece of advice I can give."

Read more here.

Townsend will release Order Of Magnitude - Empath Live Volume 1 on October 23, a document of his Winter 2019 European tour that saw him taking on possibly his most ambitious live show to date.

Today sees the launch of the second clip from the release, and you can watch Devin and the Empath Volume 1 live band performing the track "War" below.

Devin comments: “Hello folks, here's another song from the Order Of Magnitude Blu Ray. Amidst the chaos of recent times, I look back at this concert as being another world in a lot of ways, and although the DVD has many different feels throughout the concert, this song, ‘War’ is indicative of the beginning vibes of the show. The whole idea with this concert was to experiment with playing songs from my catalog that didn’t rely on backing tracks or clicks, so assembling 10 people onstage to do this was no small feat. I wanted to create an experience for band and audience alike that was creative and without boundaries (to the best of our abilities), and I am very proud of it. The next song we will release will be a different vibe, but for now, please enjoy this take on a song of mine from the Infinity era. It was originally about fighting back against your own self destructive mechanisms and thoughts, so maybe that's appropriate for what has been going on recently. Again; Thank you for the support and I hope you are finding the strength to get through this chaotic year.”

Recorded in December 2019 in London, UK on the penultimate night of the tour in support of his latest album Empath, this run of shows saw Devin joined by an incredible lineup of musicians. The band was made up of guitarists Mike Kenneally (ex-Frank Zappa) and Markus Reuter (Stick Men, The Crimson Project), drummer Morgen Agren (Kaipa, Mats & Morgan, Frank Zappa), bassist Nathan Navarro, Haken keyboard player Diego Tejeida, and guitarist/vocalist Ché Aimee Dorval, as well as vocalists Samantha & Anne Preis and Arabella Packford.

Devin’s plan for the Empath touring cycle was to divide it up into three ‘Volumes’, and this was Volume 1. The idea behind the shows was a simple one: none of the backing tapes or click tracks that had long been necessary to bring the kaleidoscopic cacophony in his head and on his records to life in the flesh. This would just be Devin Townsend and a band of genius-level musicians getting up there and trying to keep it from spinning off into outer space. Or maybe just letting it spin-off into outer space for the sheer hell of it.

“The whole objective was that I wanted to make that statement: This is by the seat our pants,” he says. “Because it's important to me to represent this hyper anal-retentive music that I've made over the years, but in a human way. Rather than it just being, ‘Well, here it is, perfectly done.’”

“I was overwhelmed by the fact that all these brilliant people that I have so much respect for were willing to come together and play this weird shit with me,” says Devin. “I had these unique players and this interesting instrumentation that allowed us to interpret the music in different ways. It was clear to me that I could just have fun and be me and know that they would be effortlessly be able to follow that.”

That sense of fun and freedom was evident to anyone who was there on the night. Visually, it was an assault on the senses in the best possible way. A digital screen projected vivid images throughout the show. A giant gleaming mirrorball hung from the ceiling. There were multiple costume changes and a tiki bar onstage (a tiki bar!).

Order Of Magnitude - Empath Live Volume 1 will be released as a Limited Deluxe 2CD+Blu-Ray+DVD Artbook (including expanded artwork & photos), Limited 2CD+DVD Digipak, Standalone Blu-Ray, Gatefold 3LP+2CD vinyl box-set & as a Digital Album. The Blu-Ray disc includes a bonus behind the scenes documentary, and both DVD & Blu-Ray feature a 5.1 surround sound mix.

Pre-orders are now available here.

Tracklisting:

"Borderlands"
"Evermore"
"War"
"Sprite"
"Gigpig Jam"
"Coast"
"Gato"
"Heavens End"
"Ain’t Never Gonna Win"
"Deadhead"
"Why?"
"Lucky Animals"
"Castaway/Genesis"
"Spirits Will Collide"
"Disco Inferno"
"Kingdom"

"Genesis" video: