Interview with brutal death band, Ulcerate
Cheers Jamie! Firstly I must say Everything Is Fire was a great album. You guys once again steered clear of stagnation, which clearly seems to be the place where most bands are headed to these days. You guys seem to give a lot of importance to the evolution of your sound because I really can’t say Everything is Fire sounded like Of Fracture and Failure ’cause they are not. So tell me what inspires the sounds of Ulcerate?
Cheers man appreciate it. Yeah stagnation is really not something on our agenda, and I think from the outset it’s been very important for us to establish the fact for anyone listening that we’re not going to release the same album twice. In terms of inspiration these days, not a lot in terms of outside influence, more-so introspection and hearing things within our own sound that we’d like to develop or shy away from. I’m as frustrated as anyone else with the way the sound of metal (death metal in particular) is heading. Albums from 15-20 years ago sound fresher and more inspired, and possess a far greater sensibility of making things sound sinister and oppressive.
Gorguts meets Portal – these two bands strike my mind each time I give your albums a listen. The dissonance is as evident as the unseasoned style of your drumming. And you guys manage to complement these elements well with the dense atmospheric passages. Tell us about your songwriting process. What’s the main element you keep in your mind while making your music?
The main focus in our writing is to maintain an organic flow of ideas and moods, regardless of how involved or stripped back a part might be. That’s really the only precedent, within those confines we’re more or less completely open to experiment. Ultimately we just want to create very interesting, very sinister and bleak music full stop, regardless of how it does or doesn’t align with specific genre tags.
I read in some interview that you’re a fan of Lovecraft, which I must say is kind of evident from your music. I always get thinking as though the Outer Gods are lumbering on a gigantic field listening to your music. Does H.P Lovecraft inspire you? I clearly think Lurking Fear was one of his best stories, Call of Cthulhu was pretty meh.
Not us unfortunately! I’m completely unfamiliar with Lovecraft, don’t think any of the other guys know his work either…
Your artwork too is quite abstract in the sense that most death metal artwork involve heavy usage of blood and gore but you capture a more subtle yet devious form of darkness in your works. What do the covers signify?
We don’t have any interest whatsoever in the gore/horror themes evident in a lot of death metal, it’s been done to death, and it just honestly isn’t exciting to any of us. The way I view the visual aesthetic is that it’s a perfect complement to the aural component of the band, and it gleans context from Paul’s lyrics, as well as our overall encompassing themes for the albums. It’s relatively non-figurative or abstract as that’s the nature of the ideas we’re working with. Tonally it matches the feel of the music, more or less paints the visual side of what we’re trying to do with the music.
I’m sure you guys grinded your asses hard to come up with kickass albums in Everything is Fire and Of Fracture and Failure. But can you say your end results were tangible to your efforts? If there’s any change you would want to make to any of your albums, what would that be?
Yeah we do work very hard on these albums – more or less gets consumed with it for a full year. And no, I don’t think we’ll ever be 100% happy with the output, hindsight always lets you see things objectively. But every recording we do the better they hold up in that regard.
Ulcerate. What does the name means? How did you come up with it?
We’ve never had gore themes or violent lyrics per se, so it was always meant metaphorically, the cancer of mankind more or less. We were teenagers when we came up with the name, so it doesn’t really ring so true with our themes these days, but it is what it is.
Most of your lyrics have dabbled with humanity’s change and evolution and its various aspects. Where do you see humanity is headed towards in the near future? Something devious or something delirious?
So hard to say man, I view things as rationally as I possibly can, so I could go either way. Since the industrial revolution we’ve really managed as a species to jump out of the flow of nature – we’re almost quite alien to the ecosystem on earth – and we’re certainly starting to see the consequences of that these days.
How was your European tour experience? You also supported Decapitated on one of their comeback gigs, and I hail Decapitated. How was it playing alongside them? Do they still have the ‘it’ factor in them? Do you think their new drummer can fill up the boots of Vitek?
We didn’t play with Decapitated recently, although we played with them right before Vitek’s passing. The tour was really awesome on all fronts both from a playing perspective and travel/organization perspective. Great bands to play with, a great support crew, and most importantly, the opportunity for us to play for people from the other side of the planet.
You guys never had any permanent vocalist. But now your bassist Paul has taken up the vocal duties. How much effort has he put in to make that transition? How come you guys didn’t think of him as the vocalist before?
He put in a lot of practice to get his voice sounding where it needed to. We never thought of that in the past purely out of circumstance, we started the band with a standalone vocalist and it just never occurred to us to streamline.
I read that you handle the production of your band’s efforts yourself. Is it because you don’t want the label guys to meddle with your sound or you have certain ideas in your mind your mind you want to adhere to without any interference?
It’s a combination of circumstance, facility and a holistic approach. We’ve always done our own recordings as there’s literally no studio over here that specializes in the sound, or even has an idea of how oppressive music should sound. Either ridiculously flat or way to clean and clear. But it’s also an issue that we are very particular in how we want to present our music, and recording ourselves is just a run-on from looking after as much in a DIY sense we can.
Which death metal albums according to you are underrated? I clearly think Cancer and Benediction along with the Finnish death scene save Demilich, Demigod are severely un-appreciated and they certainly deserve better.
Bolt Thrower as a band still surprises me how under the radar they are. Exmortem I think of in the same light. Honestly though being under rated is a good thing, weeds out the potential fuck-wits who get into music because of a certain scene or perceived status.
New Zealand drew all their games in the World Cup when couple of their main team players without club representation haven’t even featured in any international football in the last 2 years! That’s super-kickass, although their game sucked! What do you think about it? Who do you think will win the World Cup?
No idea man, don’t follow soccer at all!
Coming from India, I have no clue about New Zealand metal scene till you guys came up with your albums. I’m guessing the scene there is as nascent as over here, couple of notch better maybe. Tell us how the New Zealand scene started.
NZ’s always had extreme bands, just in a very limited amount. It’s an ebb and flow of quality local bands, and just honestly pure drivel. Been seeing mostly the latter for a few years now.
What albums are you headbanging to these days? Any recommendations?
Anything by the following bands: Antaeus, Aosoth, Arkhon Infaustus, Immolation, Jakob, Cult of Luna, Deathspell Omega, Exmortem’s ‘Funeral Phantoms’.
You guys never tread the technical path nor the brutal path, yet your songs are pretty crushing in your unorthodox playing style. And I’m guessing you will never follow those paths in the future as well. So you planning on any new experimentation with your sounds for your next album? Maybe following classical music arrangements or jazz style of playing?
We’ll always tread the path of a more unorthodox style for sure, no point rehashing what has been done since the late 80’s. In terms of jazz and classical, no. There’s really nothing to draw from jazz for this style of music in a compositional or arrangement sense – whilst I appreciate the style from a theory and musical perspective, melodically and rhythmically it really has no place in dark, aggressive music. I also feel that there’s a proclivity for people in metal to name drop older, more established forms to add some validity to attempting virtuosity in metal, which I just don’t understand or care for. Classical music on the other can be very similar melodically and rhythmically to metal, but we just honestly don’t draw any inspiration from it whatsoever for Ulcerate.
I’ll stop asking more questions till your next album. Thanks for your time. Any last words?
Cheers for the interview and support, we appreciate it!