At any given time, there are great movements that are taking place on several continents. These days we're seeing doom/stoner/whatever metal growing exponentially. Witchapter stopped by the tallest tower at the Glacially Musical World Domination Headquarters Annex in Northern Wales.
This is what we talked about....
Glacially Musical: Thank you for taking some time for me. I'd love to learn more about you guys.
Witchapter: The pleasure is ours.
GM: Let's start at the beginning. In my writers' circles...I saw some consternation about how to pronounce t he name of the band. Please settle that once and for all.
WC: The appropriate and I guess the easiest way to answer this is 'Witch Chapter', but I (Chris) preferred the way it sat on the page as one word, so it was combined to give 'Witchapter'.
GM: Tell me about the band's aesthetic. It's a bit avant-garde for a doom metal band. How did it come about?
WC: We wanted to pictorially represent our band in a way equally as dramatic as the music, something which in our opinion not enough bands do or take advantage of. There are a lot of 'stand about and look mean' photo shoots in metal, we wanted to do something different and invest time and thought into our shots.
GM: In 2017, the sub-genre doom metal has about as many connotations as there are notes on a fret board. Can you tell me what makes something doom metal?
WC: In our opinion doom is defined by a feeling, a general sense of sombreness and despair. The genre, generally speaking, is associated with this particular psychology and its something we as a band relate to and try to tap into with our material.
GM: Your debut ep, Spellcaster, has three very different tracks on it. It was like three very short albums. Was that intentional?
WC: I (Chris) would take that as high praise! Doom metal is, by its very nature, reliant on repetition and we wanted to move around the different methods of delivery and structure within our songs whilst not ignoring basic principals associated with it.
GM: How did Witchapter come together?
WC: We have all known each other for a long time and are close friends, having previously been in a band called Breaking The Day so we knew we would gel well together in another project when the time came. I (Chris) had moved back into the area, after living in Brighton for a few years and had some early ideas for a band, a few concepts and song ideas kicking around in my head. I demo'd some of these ideas and sent them to Louie and Bobby and ten months later here we are.
GM: If you looked in your fridge right now, what's the strangest thing in there?
WC: Well, there are currently two things in my fridge, one is a carton of full cream milk, the other is a Papa John's Sour Cream and Chive dip. You tell me which one is strangest? GM: What do you think are the five most important albums of all time?
WC: Wow, rolling out the heavy questions now! Ok, 'most important of all time' for the purposes of this interview is a fairly subjective question, being that its importance is relative to us and not the whole world, lets say.
If we were to list these in terms of importance to the world or 'music history' I'd have to write something about the Beatles, and I'm not going to do that. So, they are: Immortal - Sons of Northern Darkness, Nirvana - In Utero, Electric Wizard - Dopethrone, Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath, and Oasis - What's the Story Morning Glory.
GM: How do you listen to music at home?
WC: Record player and iTunes, mostly.
GM: What questions did I leave on the table?
WC: I suppose an obvious one would be the questions a lot of bands have on the future of touring and travel overseas. Brexit and Trump taking the White House has left a lot of us concerned as to what changes will be made to the process of playing and travelling to countries as a band.
I know almost all of this is speculative at this current time but its certainly something we are concerned about.
No comments:
Post a Comment