yo Hellmut (Guitars&Vocals),
glad to have your band on our page, since you destroyed live very recently on
November to Dismember Hangover in Chisinau. In familiar agriculture terms of
our country, with your performance you took care to plow the minds of audience
with some quality brutal death metal and interesting arrangements in music,
which was a pleasure to follow.
Hey Roman!
Thanks for having us on your page and also the nice words on our music and the
show in Chisinau! We were really happy that the people there liked us. It was
our first time to Moldova and we were really curious what the reactions might
be like. Well, there are no complains! :)
How do you
feel on your side being on stage and what are your impressions of that show?
I remember
that night very well, i was looking forward to play in a country i have never
been to before and also to be with Abnormyndeffect, with whom we played the
November To Dismember festival and they also played in our town with us in
2010. It was one of the shows you enjoy from the very first moment, because the
audience was freaking out from the very beginning and that pushed us also. I
love these shows where band and audience enjoy the music together and hang out
afterwards together. It was all about music and that's what we came for!
Tell us
some words of this recent eastern tour and how you can compare experience of
live shows in different parts of Europe?
On this
tour we were playing Romania for the fourth time meanwhile, Bulgaria for the
third time and we played Hungary and the Czech Republic before. The show in
Budapest was the first on this tour and really special to me. We played with
bands we knew quite well and it was also my 43rd birthday. It was like a party
with friends you see not as often as you want to. The November To Dismember
festival was also very special for me, the chance to play directly before
Pungent Stench was an absolute honor!
Actually i
can't compare with too many other countries, cause we "only" played
in that region besides germany, but being and playing there is always much more
fun than here at home. People over there much more appreciate a band playing
live and go much more wild. We played much less cities here in germany than we
did southeast from here and we are happy every time get a chance to come back!
If
everything will work out as we planned, we will play in some other countries,
the ones around germany and then we will know if only german audiences are so
calm.
About your
band, you exist from 2007, how did you come together with your bandmates, what
are your occupations beside music?
Our bass
player Svenne and i started the band with a drummachine. I had to do all the
vocals while playing guitar and i wasn't too happy with that, because i play
much better when i don't have to scream all the time. :)
Svenne and
i have played together in a couple of other bands before and finally wanted to
have a band where we can do whatever we want, before Casus we were always
limited. Pretty soon after we started our singer Alex joined, it worked out
very good from the very beginning, even though it is his very first band. While
we were recording our first demo the band of our drummer Adrian broke up, they
were practicing in the same building as us. We were checking the recordings, he
walked by and wanted to meet the drummer. We told him that it was a drummachine
and he asked if we were looking for a real drummer. So we were complete pretty
fast and easy.
There was
also an experiment with a second singer, because i like much more being only a
guitar player. It didn't work out on the personal level, so he left and we
decided not to change the line up anymore. Why fix something that works?
Besides the
music i work at a workshop for mentally handicapped people. I do that for more
than 20 years now and i am happy that i was so lucky to get a job i like to do.
My two co workers are really nice ladies, they do not like the music that we
play, but they like the fact that i am doing. They are really helpful and
always make it possible for me to get the days off from work when there is a
tour.
Your
discography consist of only a demo and an ep dated 2008 and 2011 respectively
(correct me if I’m wrong), what are your plans for future?
Actually we
have two demos, from 2008 and 2009, the EP "Hysteria" is from 2010.
We have been recording a few songs in february this year, but the guy who did
the recordings, did them with a much too high input level. Due to this it was
impossible to edit them, it sounded even more distorted the more we tried to
make it sound better. We wasted some time trying to make them sound usable,
they were supposed to be on a 7" and also for some split EPs with some
other bands, also for some compilations.
The plan
now is to record songs for a full length CD early 2015, it will be done by a
well known person in the scene, you could call him a legend. I don't want to
say the name yet, it is bad putting out rumours when something goes wrong and
then somebody else will do it. As soon as it a definite thing, i will let you
and your readers know!
There are
also some more shows and tours planned, but i don't want to talk about them
before they are confirmed too. I hope you understand why, we don't want people
to think we talk a lot of shit just to get recognition. Again, as soon as we
have them confirmed, you will be amongst the first to know!
What’s the
process, by the way, of composing music, where do you get your inspiration and
motivation, what do you want to achieve?
You may
have recognised that we rarely repeat riffs in our songs, to us it is much more
interesting to let the song evolve somewhere. None of us knows what it it will
sound like in the end, there is no plan, we just add stuff until we feel that a
song is finished.
The
inspirations come from the music that we listen to at home, i think. We never
want it to sound like some certain band, but sometimes you can tell the
band by which a riff was inspired. I
think it is not a bad thing when it is obvious where our roots are, as long as
we don't sound like a certain band.
The only
thing we want to achieve is to write songs that we like to play. When people
like it, it is an awesome feeling, but we will never change our style to get
bigger audiences or to sell more CDs. You would recognise if we were trying to
do something that sells better, it will not sound honest anymore.
Is it hard
in Germany for new band to get acknowledged?
Yes, it is.
People here tend to follow trends much more, a few years ago it was Metalcore,
now it is Doom. Another thing is, that so many bands play here and the smaller
shows are often low attended. The eastern part of germany is a bit different,
that is the reason we like to play there so much. They have more metal clubs
and the metal culture is way better there. Saxonia is always a blast, our
region has almost no metal scene.
Since
nowadays we have a lot of good music, and a big variety inside metal, how do
you feel it will evolve further? For each genre you already can make a library,
also for experimental and avant-garde. Do you think there’s a chance to explore
new territories in brutal death or extreme metal in general?
I think it
is impossible to say where the metal scene will go, nowadays older trends come
back and disappear, like Thrash and melodic metal a few years ago. A good thing
is that the Death Metal scene always had a strong folowing in the underground.
I totally
think that some bands will always come up with something new and innovative,
just look back on how Death Metal sounded like in the beginning and what it became.
Bands like Necrophagist, Beneath The Massacre, Cynic or Obscura for example
added new and fresh things to the music and i think it will always be this way.
Death Metal has a big tolerance for experiments, this is what it makes my
favorite kind of Metal, Death Metal can be everything in between Six Feet Under
and Braindrill and they play completely different music!
What kind
of new bands or new albums can you recommend as original?
My
recommendations would be Beneath The Massacre when it comes to uncompromising
brutality, Necrophagist for the most listenable and melodic brutal stuff and i
totally love Kill With Hate and Angerseed from Hungary for excellent Death
Metal. Two bands which are absolutely worth to be checked out.
Animals As
Leaders have come up with something absolutely amazing, completely unplayable
for me. :)
Do you
enjoy other music beside metal?
Yes, i am a
big Pink Floyd fan and also like the so called Classic Rock, like Journey,
Springsteen, Creeddence Clearwater Revival and so on. I also enjoy some Jazz,
but i am absolutely no expert on this music. When somebody plays something to
me that i like, i will buy it, but there are only a few artists and bands that
i really know. It was in 1983 when i started to listen to Metal and that made
me an expert in Metal music. :)
Your
perfect pastime?
Well,
playing guitar of course! :D
And i love
listening to music and also to read a lot. That's pretty much all i do, besides
hanging out with friends.
What about
your lyrics, are they important or do they have a message?
Our lyrics
usually deal with bad things in society and things that piss us off, like the
way we treat the environment for example. We don't have the illusion that we
are able to change the world, but it gjves us the chance the chance to scream
out the anger and frustration that we get when we follow the news. And when
somebody reads our lyrics and starts to think about the topics, we already
achieved something.
But music should also always be fun, even when
it is brutal, so we also have a few not too serious lyrics. One of them is an
ode to the female chest, called "Breasts", another one is a short
Grindcore song, the lyrics are put together of qoutes of the three old Star
Wars movies, in absolutely no particular order, they just had to fit.
How did the
collaboration with Axa Valaha come together and how does it work out?
That was a
nice coincidence, Guilherme from Krow, a brazilian band which is also one of
the bands of Axa Valaha, wrote us because they needed a show in our region. So
we organised a concert in our town and played too. Coro, the owner of Axa
Valaha, saw us and liked us that much that he signed us right away. Can you
imagine the face i made? :)
Working
with him is perfect, he is absolutely reliably and made it possible for us to
tour in and around Romania for four times. He believes in us and i prefer being
on a small label, which lets you do whatever you come up with, but on the other
hand immediately takes care of whatever you ask him for, because you are not band
number 694 and the bigger bands take all their time.
Ok, wish
you a good luck for any efforts and hope to hear from you soon with something
new!
Thank you a
thousand times for the interview! We will keep you updated with all news we will
have in the future.
We will
definitely meet again, the shows were too much fun not to repeat them!
Keep up the
good work with your zine, cheers from Hildesheim, Germany!
Hellmut
(Casus)
https://www.facebook.com/CasusDeath
https://www.facebook.com/CasusDeath
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