Interview:Jamie Saint Merat
Get in the Pit
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1.Aye! At first, let's talk about your debut album. Your debut album:Of Fracture And Failure was supposed to come out in December, but there was some problems with releasing and your album didn't come out and the new release date hasn't been set. Can you boys tell us, what happened?
Not too sure, we know there were some delays at the pressing plant, that pushed it back a fair bit, and there has been delays with the discs getting out to people, but unfortunately I can’t give a solid answer. I know Neurotic Records are doing their best to get it out as soon as possible…
2.You are a quite new band in metal scene. Before your coming album The Flood Records has released MCD called: The Coming of the Genocide. What was it like to record your first album? Did it take long to record all the songs, because the samples I have heard are quite technical and fast death metal. Does your album sound how you planned it to sound? Is there anything you would like to change afterwards?
Recording process went fairly smoothly, asides me nearly destroying my foot on the first day of drum tracking by dropping a cymbal on it haha but asides from that no hiccups. We took a really long time to write the tracks over a period of a couple of years, so we just came in and rocked the songs as best we could at the time. 2 days for drums, 5 for guitars and bass, 3 days for vocals and some additional time for extra guitar and ambient parts. Guitarist Michael Hoggard and myself mixed over a period of a couple of weeks I guess, it was very ‘on-off’… We wanted to get a fairly raw ‘live’ sound, so you’re not gonna find any edited and quantized drums or super clean production values, and I think we certainly nailed our ‘wall of sound’ approach. I think in some respects a lot of the nuances of we’re playing get lost in the mix a little, which is a shame, but we thought it was more important to have a denser overall sound for this record. To change afterwards? There’s a lot of things that we could do tidier next time around, fixing niggles with the mix, but the most pertinent aspect would be performance from everyone, we’re already all starting to cringe at a lot of the parts haha but that’s normal!
3.In Australia there is a big extreme metal scene. Many goood metal bands like Deströyer 666, Psycroptic, The Amenta and The Berzerker come from Australia. Your band is from New Zealand and I haven't heard any other extreme metal bands from New Zealand than Ulcerate. But can you boys tell us, is there a bid metal scene in New Zealand?
New Zealand has a very small metal scene, but the acts that do manage to produce a worthy attack are seriously fucking amazing. Dawn of Azazel are doing great things, their latest disc ‘Sedition’ is out on Ibex moon, and they’ve been touring with Disgorge + Vital Remains/Incantation etc whilst other bands like Creeping, Diocletian and Vassafor are all managing to get killer releases out on international labels also. New Zealand death and black metal is generally very fucking dark for whatever reason, and this is a good thing! The only way extreme music should sound…
4.Is your band well known in New Zealand and is there much death metal fans in your country? Can you get chicks with listening to death metal? :D
Haha well I don’t know about getting the ladies with death metal, but there’s certainly a lot of girls over here in the scene, which is always a positive! The scene here is small but defiantly enthusiastic, and more international acts are finding it’s worth their while to make the trek here. Ourselves and Dawn of Azazel are the 2 largest (in the sense we’ve achieved the most in terms of exposure and album work) extreme bands in the country, but NZ is so small it’s certainly doesn’t mean a lot – not to say of course that we haven’t worked very hard for it.
5.In the earlier times of your band your name was Bloodwreath? Why did you change your name? Was Bloodwreath not the right name to represent your music? :)
Bloodwreath was a different style really, we had a few line-up changes and were on the brink of putting out our first demo, so it seemed cool to change a name we’d grown tired of…
6.From where do the influences come to your music? Do you have any favorite metal bands which have affected to your music or style?
As of late we’re reaching outside of the metal scenes for inspiration a lot more, finding inspiration in stuff like Bohren und der Club of Gore, Jakob, Jesu, Isis, Godspeed - more post-rock in essence. Not that Ulcerate will ever become post-rock, just the aesthetic and use of dark ambience is very intriguing… And yeah of course there are is amazing metal that needs no introduction: Immolation, Gorguts, Shining, Krisiun, Hate Eternal, Angelcorpse, Anaal Nathrakh, Blut Aus Nord, Gorgoroth, Cryptopsy, Suffocation, Today is the Day…
7.You are not so old guys. Are you doing a dayjob or do you have time to work or does music take all the time you have?
Yeah, we all have day jobs unfortunately. I’m a graphic designer, and we have such talents in the band as soup kitchen employee, banker, professional Japanese student and at the moment, professional bum haha
8.How do you see the future of death metal? Do you think that young bands sound all same and is there anymore anything new what to make in death metal?
Death metal’s future is insured by any bands that are reaching out and putting out music that strays from the mediocre path that has been stagnating the sound for a while now. I think that there a lot of younger bands that are turning out to be the saving grace of the sound – killer stuff like Decrepit Birth (especially latter material), Odius Mortem, Atakhama, Negativa, Hour of Penance, Necrophagist, Psycroptic, Wormed, Spawn of Possession… The main focus of a band should be finding their own identity - death metal as a genre is totally obsessed with producing cookie-cutter clone bands. At the same time there is an influx of super-trendy bullshit (don’t need to name names) that takes bits and pieces of the death metal sound and whores’ it out in a hardcore ‘dance’ and ‘breakdown’ context. I’m not alone in being disgusted by this movement, hopefully it will die out soon enough.
There is always new paths and directions to be taken in any musical context, death metal is no different – it just happens to be that the majority of death metal ‘musicians’ think its some sort of contest to out-brutal each other and we end up with boring-ass repetitive shit.
9.How long have you guys played music and when did you start tolisten to death metal or metal music.
We’ve all been playing music for close to a decade, all of us started around 13-14… I think we all started listening to death metal around then, but didn’t get into playing it in some form till around 16-17, so I guess 6-7 years or so of death metal for us hehe
10.In the end I would like ask, is alcohol important part of listening to metal music ?
Haha It definetly is for the majority of people - I’m no super huge drinker though, but a definite ‘yes’ will answer your question!!
Cheers for the interview Lauri …
www.offractureandfailure.com
ulcerate@gmail.com
