Hometown Tales with Michael Bala of Bloodfeast Ritual

Certainly there are some readers out there who're like this blogger and wonders what life amongst the northern states is like?

Not about those states like New York, Pennsylvania, or Illinois, but the seriously northern states..the ones that are up night cuddling with Canada.

Well, if only there was some way this could be brought to the proletariat via Glacially Musical.

Welp. Here's a man from Fargo, ND.

In the mean time, there's always this EP there over at BANDCAMP.

1. St. Louis City is my hometown. I've lived here for most of my life in and around the city. 

Where are you from?

I am from Fargo, North Dakota!

2. We have three things that don't really exist anywhere else: the slinger, the gooey butter cake, and toasted ravioli. Tell me about your hometown delicacy.

Well, every town has cheeseburgers, but in the Fargo-Moorehead area, which encompasses a number of small towns in both North Dakota and Western Minnesota.

There’s a bar called the Hi-Ho Tavern. To this day, it’s still my favorite burger in the world. I could eat 2 or 3 of them and still go crazy on the fries and in house root beer.

3. In St. Louis, though there have been others. Our biggest hometown team is the St. Louis Cardinals (formerly the St. Louis Perfectos, nee: the St. Louis Browns, not the AL team that moved to Baltimore.) There is nowhere you can go to escape it. I'm a hockey fan, not a baseball fan, so it's a bit weird to me. Tell me about your hometown's big team.

Fargo doesn’t have a major league sports teams, so we tend to look to the Twin Cities in Minnesota. People generally love the Vikings (football) Twins (baseball) and Wild (NHL). 

That being said, we have a minor league baseball team called the RedHawks that I loved watching as a kid. I still have a few jerseys from the 90s when they were founded.

4. St. Louis isn't really known for any one type of music scene. The biggest acts I can think of to get out of here alive were Gravity Kills, Nelly and the St. Lunatics, and Sheryl Crow. There's always been a vibrant concert scene though. What about where you are?

Fargo actually has a pretty good youthful music scene. There are a lot of punk and metalcore bands that my friends in high school played in. 

There were always people to jam with and that alone was very inspiring.

5. 20 years ago, St. Louis had about 300 murders each year, floods, and all sorts of other fun things. You might have heard about us being named the Murder Capital of the USA. Nowadays, a lot here is 150. But there are lots of parts of the city that are returning to former glory. On the whole, St. Louis is a better place to live today than before. 

Is there anything like that where you're from?

We have a yearly flood where kids get a week off of school in order to sandbag the Red River to make sure our town isn’t washed away. 

In a strange way, this has become a sort of “rite of passage” for Fargo kids. 

There’s a sort of unity that brings the town together every year, and although this sounds like it should be on a Hallmark card, it’s very heartwarming.

6. Are you still there?

I am not, but I miss it every day. I moved out to Boston to attend Berklee, and after that my fiancee and I chose to relocate to LA for career reasons.