Interview mit Lucas Gadke von Völur

The ongoing corona pandemic continues to hit the music industry hard. How are you personally and as a band coping with the current situation?
Well, me personally, I’m doing fine. I work as a carpenter in film and television and they are taking this whole situation very seriously and keeping all the workers very safe. Testing, masks, sanitizing everything and actually paid sick leave, it’s pretty great. But I guess that’s the benefit of having a union to back you up. As a band it’s been fairly weird. Toronto is being hit very hard by the virus largely due to a bungled response by our government. So we, for safety reasons, we haven’t been practicing very much. We have a lot of things that we completed pre-pandemic that we’re still working on so we’re going to get those ready for release in 2021.

One of your most distinctive features is that you don’t use an electric guitar, but an electric violin instead. Why do you think this instrument is so seldom used in metal?
Well I think that not many people get pushed in that direction when they play violin. It’s easy to go along with what’s known so often people go into folk or classical or even jazz. We were inspired by bands like The Dirty Three and High Tide and of course SubRosa. But more than that it’s more the fact that Laura plays violin and we wanted to start a band. A band should be about the people playing the music not just the instruments.

In general, almost every metal band works with the classic instrumentation of guitar, bass and drums. From your point of view, is it still possible to create something special that way after 50 years of metal?
Yeah, of course, if the people are creative and inquisitive about the musical world. There’s so much amazing stuff going on that’s played by just your standard metal quartet or quintet. Adding a different instrument doesn’t automatically make it more interesting or special. The people and the ideas are what does that. If we SUCKED (which I’m sure a lot of people think we do) then we’d just be a band that sucks with a violin player. But, I think, we’re creative musicians who are good at our craft, so the music stands on its own. An instrument can give you access to different sounds and techniques but doesn’t push the music along on its own.

I have the impression that you are very closely and humorously interacting with your fans via social media. Do you think that a stoic seriousness is sometimes overrated by metal and folk fans?
This was a real discussion in the band. We tried to be dour and serious and mysterious at the beginning, but it just didn’t jive with who we are. I am NOT a serious person. And don’t think I can be. So I figured it would be better to try and be myself when interacting with fans. The music is still serious, but online I have to be who I am. There’s also an element of it where I need to step back and laugh about the band in order to fully go in on it when I’m navigating through these themes and thought processes when I’m writing.
I think if a person is serious and wants to present the band that way, they should do it. Do what feels true to you. If you’re able to fully present your music as a fully articulated brand from stem to stern, then I applaud you. Unfortunately we are but humble jazz school grads. I’m just a carpenter who likes avant-garde music and doom metal, so I don’t have the capacity to present my music in grim pomposity in every instance.

Experimental music like yours seems to be predestined for mixed reactions. In this respect, are you satisfied with how your new album „Death Cult“ was received by the people?
We’ve been so happy with the feedback. I think it’s found its audience. People who are open to weirder sounds and mixes of genres have received it with open arms. People who we like us seem to really like us and that makes me so happy. We thought this was an improvement over our last record and that sentiment has been echoed by the fans and reviewers and that’s all we could hope for. If you release something and people pick it up and instinctively hear what you were trying to emote, then you’ve done your job.

In our last interview you announced that you wanted to improvise more on your next record, and even the term „free jazz“ has been used to refer to „Death Cult“. So did everything turn out the way you intended?
Yeah definitely, we got some freaky passages in there! I’m still not done either, I want to do more improv stuff and we have some “jazzier” things coming out (not in sound, but in approach). Let’s just say we’re going to go further down that road in the future

Was it difficult to let the music develop even more spontaneously?
Not really, we’re all jazz students so we have comfort with improvisation. The difficult art is integrating into the songs. Heavy metal is a very through composed music. You often play the parts exactly the same every time. And we embrace this approach too. But building pieces where those rigid structures just fall a way and then immediately come back is challenging but fun. It’s an approach we developed through our work in Gates, a Toronto drone/doom/prog/avant-garde collective that we’ve been involved in for some years that’s just releasing some new material right now (which I highly recommend you check out). It’s a kind of writing that goes back to people like Duke Ellington or Charles Mingus. Things go open and then tighten back up. It’s tough but it’s very fun.

Ironically, from my point of view the album is even more concise than your previous releases. How does that fit in with the more intuitive creation of the songs?
We went in with a mind to keep everything tight, but also to improvise. So we ended up setting time limits on the free parts. So it’s like “ok, jam for 16 bars at the end I’ll play this phrase and that’s the signal to come out of it.” Or “maybe we’ll go free for what feels like a… moment and a half?” You can be concise and free. Maybe the next thing we’ll work on will be some sort of miniature free pieces. Anton Webern meets power violence meets Albert Ayer? It also means things can be elastic when you play live. If you’re feeling on fire that night then maybe a section can go long, which is nice.

You now also use higher screams on „Death Cult“. Are they performed by Laura Bates? And what inspired you to expand your vocal repertoire?
I think Laura did some screams on the last album, didn’t she? I’m not sure. If you can expand your palette of sounds, why not? It adds for a great range of sounds. It also evokes the sound of bands like Dark Castle or maybe Romantic Gorilla and I’m all for that.

Especially in „Dead Moon“ the screams are an interesting counterpart to the almost romantic nature of the song. What is the idea behind this dichotomy?
I guess we just like contrast. I want to have that song move towards a fever pitch of emotion. And I guess I thought after a full four or five minutes of harmony, you would need to take it up even a little further. I also wanted to see if I could get some sort of Khanate or funeral doom vibes mixed with some Phrygian melody.

From my point of view „Freyjan Death Cult“ is the most unusual song on the record. Apart from the fact that the intro sounds downright disturbing and is followed later by a laid-back blues part, there is even a clarinet in it. How did this track in particular come about?
Well, things often start out as concepts and then are refined as you play them. The bass clarinet – played by our lovely friend John David Williams – came as a conscious nod to Eric Dolphy, one of the patron saints of the band. Beyond that the idea for the whole record was to have two LP sides that are kind of distorted mirror images of each other. So “Inviolate Grove” and “Freyjan Death Cult” both start with a diminished chord (Adim and G#dim respectively) and then are followed by an extended improv section, then a heavy riff, then Chaos. So the forms are all similar, but taking on a variety of sounds, feels and maybe genres, one could say. The album centres around the idea of a ritual sacrifice that is transposed through time and space. “Freyjan” is the most, well, “futuristic” feeling song to me. So I wanted to have a nod to some more, I don’t know, modern styles.
It feels hard to articulate these things properly because they often come from a few different places. Is it like a gat in Indian classical? Is it a sort of nod to the Second Viennese School? It’s all kind of bouncing around in there.

In general, you combine an extraordinary variety of different styles on „Death Cult“. Do genres even in the least matter to you at this point?
They do because I like a variety of genres. But overall, I wouldn’t want to limit myself to specific sounds. Genres are more about methods of creation and traditions of composition and execution than about sounds and timbres, in my opinion. It’s best to explore many genres so you can use those tools and approaches freely in your music. The more music you learn, the more you’ll be able to express yourself. But, as I said before, as long as it’s you playing it, it will be you, as long as you have control of your instrument and music making. That’s what matters to me. I’d like to get to the point where we could do maybe a fully jazz record, or a fully through-composed classical piece and still have it be US.

Critics and fans like to compare bands with other bands – a custom that’s probably a bit unpleasant to the musicians themselves. With you, however, most people will surely find this difficult. Which artists and/or bands would you associate yourself with?
Don’t really mind, it’s a convenient entree into music. There’s so much damn music out there so any shorthand to help guide my attention is beneficial. If an album had “for fans of The Police”, I’d know to stay away because I hate The Police and Sting. So if people want to talk about our music and say “for fans of Mournful Congregation, Amber Asylum, Agalloch, Ulver, Oranssi Pazuzu” I’d be happy with that. I think we take from a bunch of bands that we don’t sound like, in an intellectual way: Eric Dolphy, Fairport Convention, The Beastie Boys, Sleep, Corrupted.

Although you deal with the human sacrifices of the Germanic tribes on the album, according to your label the record’s lyrics also concern modern, social criticism. How did this connection come about when you wrote the lyrics?
It came about while sitting in my backyard, writing the lyrics out and thinking about empire, the earth goddess to whom sacrifices were made and recycling. In Toronto, we have a massive recycling program, but a couple years ago it came out that almost all of it just ends up in the landfill anyway. Many things that are recyclable aren’t washed by consumers making them useless, many things people think are recyclable are not. And I got to thinking that we as the citizens of this city have to pay for all this stuff while it’s these big companies that make the plastic and all the disposable shit that they sell and make a profit off. And then we have to make sure that their mess is dealt with properly. So I thought about having a sacrifice, a ritual to the earth goddess, that let’s be frank, does nothing and does not work. So me separating the plastic lid from my disposable coffee cup and throwing one in the garbage and the other in the recycling, only to have both end up at the bottom of a mine in Michigan (Toronto transports all its landfill to the States), seems patently insane to me. I call it an environment indulgence. We’re doing these little things to feel better about ourselves while the world is burning around us.

On the occasion of the protests after George Floyd’s death, you expressed your support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Indifference towards and even active racism are unfortunately not uncommon in the (black) metal underground. Do you think that people are slowly becoming more aware of this problem now?
I hope they are. Metal definitely has a problem with this that needs to be dealt with. I don’t really know how. I think more bands should come forward and say what’s on their minds. People have always been aware that there was dark shit lurking in the underground, but I don’t think a lot of people, including me, realized how pervasive it was. I don’t understand how these people go down these paths towards hate but I hope we can help them come back. Despite our dark music we are some sort of weird hippies at heart.

Do you already have further plans for the near future of VÖLUR – maybe already first ideas for the next record?
We have two EPs almost done! We released an EP called “Veiled City” digitally earlier in the year and will be making that available in physical form soon. It’s part of our series called “Die Sprachen der Vögel,” which are collaborations with local artists. Look for more of those in the future.

On Metal1.info we usually end our interviews with a short brainstorming session. What do you think of the following keywords?
US presidential election: The United States have one political party: capital which has a far-right and a centre-right wing.
Hyperpop: I don’t know what that is.
Climate crisis: We’re doing nothing to stop it, our relentless appetite for resources and our desire to appease bankers and a fictional god of the market is driving us to destroy this beautiful gift of a planet we have.
Your ideal line-up for your next tour: Opening for Bohren und Der Club of Gore.
Mandatory vaccination: People should get vaccinated. It should be more available to poorer countries, health care workers and those at risk. Governments will never be able to effectively enforce a mandatory vaccine roll out. They can barely enforce people paying their taxes.
Social media: Necessary but soul-sucking.

Thank you very much for your answers!

Publiziert am 31. Dezember 2020 von Stephan Rajchl