Interview mit Yurii Kazarian und Andrii Pechatkin von White Ward

Hi, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. The question of whether you’re doing well is probably redundant given the current circumstances. But what I’m sure many fans are wondering is: How are you coping and are you relatively safe at the moment?
Yurii: Hi there. Well… it has already been almost nine months since Russians openly invaded Ukraine and a full scale war has started, so some things have changed a little.
I think you know that Ukraine defeated Russians during the battle for Kyiv and also forced them to retreat from Snake Island near Odesa and even Kherson some time ago, so for now our cities are pretty far from the frontline. In this case we can say that we are relatively safe. Relatively – because there is still danger of missile or drone attack and there is always a chance to die because of Russian long-range missiles. But you know… we recovered from the initial shock and we already know how to live with that, because it is our reality now. People continue to live, to work, visiting bars, playing concerts etc. Someone could ask “How can you have fun and enjoy life during war?”, but people should understand that we need to continue to live, to support economics, to support the army and each other. Because people should be effective, not depressed and apathetic. But, of course, at the same time you should remember what is happening now and for what we are fighting for.
Also, for us as musicians it is very important that now we again have a possibility to play live thanks to our brave warriors who continue to protect or liberate our land and the fallen ones.

Russia’s currently raging war against Ukraine is not Putin’s first aggression against your country – yet many were surprised when it came to war. How acutely did you perceive this threat in recent years?
Yurii: Honestly, almost no one thought that russians could be so mad and cruel to dare to start a total war in the 21st century in the middle of the European continent. We understood that they are our enemies, that they will continue to use proxy “LNR” & “DNR” formations to not allow Ukraine to evolve properly. We thought so, because it is a favorite style of Russia – just remember Transnistria, Abkhazia, Ossetia etc. In Donbass almost all the active battles stopped in 2015, so from this moment most of the people just lived their lives and almost didn’t think about conflict. We just didn’t believe this war could be possible like that.
I started to follow the situation in December 2021. The last maybe two weeks before the invasion the atmosphere was stressful and really not calm. I tried to calm myself down and repeated arguments why it can’t happen, but somewhere deep inside my consciousness I understood that it would begin from day to day. And yes, on 24th of February I woke up because of the explosions and our lives changed forever.

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What do you think about the reactions of the West so far – the states on the one hand and civil society on the other?
Yurii: It is a very difficult question with no one exact answer. In short – of course we are absolutely thankful for all the countries who support us: USA, Poland, UK, Germany, Czech, Baltic Countries and many others. All the help, military, economical, humanitarian are priceless and we appreciate that. For example, just around 16 HIMARS systems donated to Ukraine from the USA have really changed the situation on the battlefield. It is difficult to overestimate such help. At the same time, of course, we have or had some questions about the positions of some countries or their leaders. But I understand that geopolitic is very complicated shit and there are a lot of countries that have their own interests and can’t make some serious radical decisions quickly.
The same about civil society – almost all the people support us in a lot of different ways. But, of course, sometimes we see people talking about some shit inspired by Russian propaganda or some people just don’t really understand the context and real meaning of this war and can say something hurtful or unpleasant to Ukrainians that are now perceiving everything around through the prism of reality of war. But in the second case we understand we also should try to hold ourselves in our hands and try to conduct a peaceful dialogue to make people understand what is really happening now to prevent possible future misunderstandings.

Let’s turn to talking about your new album: You address an extraordinarily wide range of grievances in the songs. Isn’t there a risk of not being able to take the complexity of the individual topics sufficiently into account or the messages not reaching the listeners clearly enough?
Andrii: I never think about listeners while working on my lyrics. And our goal is not to impress or persuade someone. I just highlight topics important to me. It is a kind of information management and systematization that helps me arrange everything in my head. Lyrics are just one of the outcomes of these processes. As well as the explanatory parts of these lyrics. I think that it would be cool if someone got my texts as intended, but it is never the main goal.
Furthermore, people may interpret my lyrics as they wish. I provide additional thoughts about each song along with possible explanations. Although they seem very straightforward, everyone can choose what information to accept, what meanings to decode, and how to interpret common words and phrases. So the concept of “not reaching our listeners with my messages” does not exist. There is no message that “should” reach someone. There is no particular “recipient” of this message.
Also, I don’t pretend to create a valuable message because all my thoughts and words are secondary compared to the sources that inspire me. It is way more efficient and useful to look for particular messages in the books that I read rather than in my lyrics.

What is the „false light“ mentioned in the album title?
Yurii: It is a metaphor to the main album idea – the protagonist is leaving a megapolis in search of better life in a rural area but finds just another layer of problems and vices of human society.

Your music can’t exactly be described as cheerful or optimistic. From your point of view, is it still possible to draw something positive or at least a sense of action from „False Light“ – or is the fight against the problems you sing about doomed to failure?
Andrii: It seems that the world is extremely flexible if you empower it with this condition. Even now, when dozens of rockets explode each day and hundreds of people die, there is still something positive happening outside and inside your head. Everything that happened to me after February, 24 taught me that I should value every second of my life. These strict and deadly conditions changed my life completely. Do I find something positive in „False Light“? Of course! The album is just dedicated to a sequence of terrible acts happening in the plot. At the same time, it clearly states that some negative things we live with are rooted deep in our past. To fix them, we need to look back from time to time and correct the mistakes. It’s just how everything works. It is neither good nor bad. It is everyone’s responsibility, whether you like it or not.
But on the global scale, the count of problems is going up and up. Do we still have an opportunity to fix that? I don’t have an answer. I only know that we should apply all our resources to the attempt to fix the evergrowing catastrophe. If we don’t do that, it will actually happen.
However, if it happens (it is already happening in the life of millions of Ukrainians), I’ll try to look for something good even in the worst-case scenario.

According to the Bandcamp description, you also denounce the „falseness of modern mainstream culture“ on the album. What exactly do you mean by that? And is pop culture really bad through and through from your point of view?
Andrii: Pop culture is neither bad nor good. It just exists with a set of particular features. I mean the global culture that includes everything from how we behave in public to what pieces of art we create. By the falseness of modern mainstream culture, I mean people’s urge for overconsumption. It’s a truly destructive force that may one day take our natural habitat away from us, not to mention thousands of other species that have already gone due to various human activities.
By the falseness of modern mainstream culture, I mean people’s inability to be honest with themselves and, as a result, live with inner harmony and peace. Perhaps, it is a common human condition for all past generations. But we are truly guilty because we didn’t manage to do anything with that.
By the falseness of modern mainstream culture, I mean people’s inability to live in harmony with the surrounding world, including other individuals and, of course, nature. However, we won’t be able to live in peace with the world around us unless we find peace inside.

Furthermore, the album is said to have been inspired by Mykhailo Kotsubinsky’s novel „Intermezzo“ – a book that many are probably not familiar with. What can you tell us about the novel and to what extent do you refer to it in your songs?
Andrii: The entire album is partly based on the idea behind the novel. Its lyrical hero is tired of living in a city and escapes to a more calm and blissful place, where he looks for rest and tries to restore harmony. That’s it. The author shares lots of thoughts about the negative impact of the urban area where he lives and describes how rural lands cure his tide and despair. Gorgeous thoughts. Stunning language. Outstanding perception. I think you should be a native speaker to get what I mean.

Jack Kerouac and Carl Jung are also said to have influenced you in the making of the album. Please briefly describe what this influence manifests itself in both cases.
Andrii: „Salt Paradise“ is a wordplay that refers to Sal Paradise from Kerouac’s „On The Road.“ As the main character of the novel, our narrator takes a journey, but it is a completely different story that has nothing in common with the famous book.
„Silence Circles“ is about family abuse and touches upon Carl Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious: the anima and animus as the unconscious feminine side of a man and the unconscious masculine side of a woman, respectively. You cannot have a stable psyche and live a healthy life when suppressing your unconscious feminine or masculine side. While the lyrics clearly illustrate a statement that family abuse is a terrible thing and we should prevent it or report it if it happens, the song also touches upon accepting the unconscious aspects of self.
I read a lot of Jung’s works, so you may find more pieces under his influence in my lyrics that I inserted involuntarily.

Visually, „False Light“ with its rustic, bright and subtly decaying cover image is exactly the opposite of „Love Exchange Failure“ with its nocturnal, urban and polished look. What ist he intention behind this contrast?
Yurii: We already talked about the idea of escaping from a megapolis to a rural place and for the design concept it was the same. We tried to show this contrast and switch from midnight megapolis to dry, rural grounds but with the saving of the neo-noir feeling. So in this case artwork aesthetic is directly connected with lyrical concept.

One can hear from your songs a great frustration about many aspects of modern life. Many other bands close to black metal turn to the past for the same reason, drawing inspiration from ancient traditions and folk music. What do you think about this approach?
Yurii: In our case, if we are talking about frustration from modern life that doesn’t mean that we are glorifying the past. I am absolutely sure that in many aspects modern human life and existence is much better than the middle ages, even in banal things like medicine or social equality, for example. For me frustration in modern life is more about how humanity uses the technological progress or so-called goods of civilization. Of course, there are a lot of examples of proper usage, but there are also a lot of examples, when people pervert even the greatest things and use it for their selfish purposes, for violence, lies, enslavement, control and wars.
This frustration is like when you are awaiting the utopic future from a 19s & early 20s fantast’s dream but receiving a Huxley’s “Brave New World”, if we use a maximalist comparison.
If you are interested in the theme of frustration in modern life you can also read some works of Erich Fromm. He wrote about the hope that industrial revolution will make humanity happy but again it was a fiction and unlimited consumption has not helped mankind to become happy.
Regarding the black metal and other bands that turn to the past then I think in most cases it is just a romanticisation. For example, the theme of medieval ages is very popular in black metal: all these stories about brave knights, heroic battles, pride and honor, ancient traditions etc . This all is very bright and interesting but does not have much in common with the life of an average middle-age peasant. All medieval traditionalists should stop dreaming and realize then if they were born in the middle ages then most possibly they would be not knights in shining armor, but peasants and it would be big luck if they would reach the age of 40 and would not die because of the plague or another infection.
Of course, in some cases we can find some really beautiful things from the past: a closer connection with nature, different ancient philosophy, practices and rituals that can really be useful for mental health and understanding of different processes, for example. Or art (you mentioned folk music) that was really sincere and not spoiled by capitalistic desire to earn money from it. But again, it is not about a regular ancient life.
So, I think that in most cases it is just a romanticisation and it is not bad to get inspiration in such a way – we just need to understand the real picture of the past to not mislead ourselves and create illusions.

Stylistically, you try out some new things on the album again: There’s a brittle acoustic number with „Salt Paradise,“ one hears influences from post-punk more often, and also a few new sounds, such as at the beginning of „Phoenix.“ What is the link that holds all these different sounds together from your point of view?
Yurii: I see an album like a multi-series movie where all the parts are linked by one concept and idea but at the same time every song is about different aspects of this whole story. The same about music: I tried to save the general style of sound and at the same time use different instruments and effects during the whole album to create variety and make this sound adventure really interesting. It was not easy and sometimes it was a bit challenging, but it is our goal, because our music is about diversity and the most free approach to creating music.

The transitions between these different parts are quite abrupt in some places. What would you counter if someone would call your songs too jumpy because of that?
Yurii: I don’t see the problem in abrupt transitions itself from my personal view and preferences, but the most important thing is how these transitions are realized I think. Because even a reverb or delay tail (feedback) or guitar feedback, vocal effect, whatever can make a real difference in this case. I think it is really difficult to realize such small but very important details in the right way. And in our case only listeners can judge how good or bad we coped with this task. If someone doesn’t like it, then we are ok with that and maybe next time we will do it better and this time this person will finally like it.

Is there anything in particular stylistically that you haven’t come around to doing yet that you’d like to try out in the future?
Yurii: Maybe using some traditional Ukrainian musical instruments in some way. Or some experiments with choir vocals. And who knows what will come to our minds tomorrow. Time will show.

You explicitly distanced yourselves from right-wing extremism in a social media post a while ago. Unfortunately, however, that ideology is quite widespread in the black metal community with most labels – including Debemur Morti – having at least a few dubious bands within their ranks. Without meaning to reproach you for anything: How do you personally deal with these tendencies?
Yurii: I am not sure that there are any tendencies with right-wing bands nowadays. They have always existed from the beginning of the 90s when black metal started to spread around the world: some bands just used some symbols or words to looks more “angry” (we can remember “Norsk Arisk Black Metal”) some were really serious nazis. But nowadays we just have the internet and everyone can check metalarchives.com, interviews, photos, social media of musicians etc, so now it is just easier to find such bands and check the possible personal views and interests of band’s members. So, I don’t think there are more right-wing bands or musicians than 10 or 20 years ago.
But now there are other tendencies – anyone can blame anyone for anything and put it to the public which can lead to very bad consequences. And I don’t mean that real nazi bands or someone who does or talks real shit shouldn’t be judged, so let me explain. I think it is pretty important nowadays, because it has touched even us.
What do you think, isn’t it extremism when some people are trying to blame someone without any serious research and destroy his career which can cause depression or even suicide, for example? Personally, I judge people on their current real actions and words and if I am absolutely sure it is true, not by where they played or the t-shirt they wore 10 years ago. It is a very bad idea to judge people on such superficial things and start to “punish” them – sometimes it becomes like a lynching. Again and again we should understand that there is not too much really “black or white” stuff but a lot of “gray”, especially in such underground communities as the black metal, industrial or neo-folk scene, for example. If you are from that so-called true black metal scene then it is very possible that you will know someone with far-right views through one or two handshakes. Even in my case some “witch hunters” found some 10+ year old dumb and absolutely not serious shit about me and WW from times when I was a 15-year old teenager and here we are – WHITE WARD already blamed as nazis and it was enough to almost cancel our show in Belgium. These people were not interested in my current views and even didn’t try to get some explanations from us to check facts. One more bright example is Bölzer: people blamed Okoi as nazi only because of an ancient pagan swastica tattoo and then it appeared that the father of Okoi is half Nigerian. Absurd situation, don’t you think?
Also, for our label there is not one band who violates someone’s rights, spreads propaganda of cruelty, intolerance or anything else that yawns at human freedom and equality. Also, on our label there are some bands who are openly antifascists and/or represent minorities. And I know the views of Phil (DMP boss) and I am totally ok with it.
Speaking about me, then let’s cement my position in this interview. I have straight red lines when it comes to worldview or ideology and they are very simple: I reject ideologies that use any form of physical or mental violence, authoritarianism and supremacy as the instrument or basis of the ideology/movement. I’m sure that all these things always bring even more violence and suffering. We are living in an epoch of democracy so the main weapon and battlefield is word and discussion – peaceful and constructive. We all can have different political, economical and social views but only in constructive discussion we can find solutions which will lead to progress and improvement of our society. But unfortunately it doesn’t work with fascism for example: if someones would like to enslave you, torture, whatever, in a violent way, then you should fight back – in this case it is a self-defense. That is why we are asking for more weapons from our allies to fight Russia.
Speaking more about radicalism that means violence in any form, I think that it is caused by people who have some mental problems, propensity for cruelty and sadism (physical or mental) and the side they joined – left or right – it is more like a confluence of circumstances. Hitler, Putin, Stalin, Hussein – all these people had/have different political sides and ideas, but all of them thought that violence and power is a key.
Finally I would like to say that this theme is very difficult and wide, so I don’t think I can explain all my positions in terms of this interview, because maybe I need more specific questions. Just one thing I can tell you absolutely sure – if your ideas are based on violence and power then we will not be friends with you.

What are your plans for the near future of WHITE WARD?
Yurii: We are planning to create and release a song in Ukrainian language and then start working on a new album. Also, next we are planning a lot of gigs and festivals, a couple of tours. Stay tuned and you will see it all!

Finally, a quick brainstorm – what comes to your mind when you hear the following buzzwords?
Ukraine victory at the ESC: Yurii: Not my cup of tea, but I am proud of them.
Andrii: I have no idea on what ESC is.
Fake News: Yurii: “Russia Today”
Andrii: False Light
The West: Yurii: “The West Knows Best” by Rome
Andrii: Carpathians
Improvisation: Yurii: I am bad at it (laughs).
Andrii: Something that we never do in the band.
Norwegian Shining vs Swedish Shining: Yurii: Not a really big fan of both, but some songs by both bands are awesome.
Andrii: I don’t remember either of them.
Your latest musical discovery: Yurii: Vatican Shadow – Persian Pillars of the Gasoline Era
Andrii: Traditional folk music of Hutsuls

Thank you so much for your responses. I hope you continue to do as well as possible. Do you have anything to add that you’d like to share with the readership?
Yurii: Thank you for such extensive questions and the opportunity to tell about our position on different questions.
And thank you for supporting Ukraine – supporting us, you support the democratic future and freedom and end of totalitarianism.

Publiziert am 11. Dezember 2022 von Stephan Rajchl