Press - Interviews

NecroSlaughter Webzine

Interview 22.03.2009 - Christian Schmitz

Hey Jamie! How are you? Thank you for giving an interview to me and my little webzine! As there were some changes within your line-up since ULCERATE started making noise, would you please introduce yourself and your band and give a brief band-history?

Sure thing, my name is Jamie Saint Merat, I co-write the tunes, bang the drums and handle the visual aspect for Ulcerate. The best guide for what we've been up to is on our site under the band section:
http://www.ulcerate-official.com/html/band.php

In the last year we've altered the line-up fairly drastically, we've gotten ourselves a new guitarist Oli Goater (actual last name!) and Paul's taken over from Ben on vocals, as well as bass duties. These changes have tightened us up considerably, and are going to allow us to progress in the right directions a lot faster.

As far as I can see you are the mastermind behind ULCERATE: You have done mixing, engineering, mastering, artwork and layout as well as some songwriting. Wow, that's a lot of work. Especially because both musical / auditive aspect as well as the optical one are two totally different worlds in my opinion. Do you do some of it professionally or is both „just“ a hobby for you? Do You play other instruments beside drums? Or how could you manage songwriting?

Mastermind no, the musical output is 50/50 between Mike H and myself, this album especially has been written start to finish by the two of us in a room hammering out ideas either melodically or percussively. And of course, the lyrical context has been delivered by Paul, so no, I certainly can't take all the credit! But yeah, I play guitar (or more specifically, can play guitar - I never really have any time to sit down with one), and have a pretty good understanding of what works and doesn't melodically and harmonically. We've developed the Ulcerate vocabulary between Mike and myself for the past 9 years, always a purely collaborative effort. And I must point out here that song-writing encompasses the drums as well! A lot of our parts come from percussive ideas and embellishments, and there is a total art-form to writing drum lines that aren't purely time-keeping devices.

In terms of professional activities - I design and code websites for a living, I have a degree in visual arts and Mike H and myself dabble here and there with engineering and mixing of other band's projects.

Considering most artworks in death metal over the last 20 years most artists think there are only two ways to express „darkness“ in a visual way: Skulls and sacral icons like falling angels, statues of devils, etc. Even grandmaster Dan Seagrave uses skulls and a lot of fantasy stuff for his incredible works. But you did not (ab)use any cliché, just your very own style. It is dark, dirty although it is not in this modern grunge-style and very individual. I don't know why, but the artwork of „Everything Is Fire“ reminds me a bit of the film „Silent Hill“ and I see some parallels between the cover of „Of Fracture And Failure“ and the creatures of H.P. Lovecraft's stories. What is your inspiration and what do you want to express by your artwork?

You're 100% correct. I can't stand played-out, rehashed 'art' - whether it's music, visuals or lyrical matter. I honestly can't see how people can be satisfied with the same tried and true formula of some sort of skull / demon as an album cover/concept. For a movement that considers itself 'extreme' and against herd conformity, there is an overwhelming plague of hipster/scenester follow-the-leader bullshit. If anything, I'd label the current state of so-called underground movements as being the very summation of what it is to be a conformist.

Style-wise, well I don't know if it's totally individual, it is what it is, I'm not trying to break boundaries with my visuals (I would never consider myself an artist). I'm a visual designer at heart, the art that I create goes 100% hand-in-hand with what I see when we're writing our tunes. To me, it's more apt to call it illustration, it's a visual representation that wraps the music and works alongside the lyrics to put a level of humanity to the aural assault. What I've come to being inspired by for this type of work lately is artist's doing exceptionally beautiful and almost minimal work with paint, Stephen Kasner comes to mind as being a huge favourite of mine. I'm working all digitally, and the one thing I can't stand is that 'Photoshop' look that's so popular (the grunge style you reference), so for me I'm a poor-man's painter haha. Kind of an emulation of painterly applications, but with an unavoidable clean, digital feel.

Next to your CD-cover your homepage, myspace-profile and even your band-pictures follow some specific aesthetic aspects. There are no clichés of the „bad guys in heavy metal“ either. I like your artistic studio shots and your band pictures. There are the elements of night and industrial landscape, concrete and streets. This is kind of depressive! What was your intention behind those not-so-metal pictures?

Yeah, I mean, I handle everything visual about us where possible, so a strong aesthetic is going to cascade through everything. And again, we're not cheesy dudes when it comes to this kind of thing, we have very serious intentions, and we want to make music that moves people. We're complete dickheads when not thinking about Ulcerate though haha. Metal is metal, and there's a reason why we were drawn to the style from the outset, so it's not like we want to distance ourselves from everything that the genre is founded upon, it's just that .... it's been done over and over. The bad-ass thing is played out. And metal bad-asses are mostly just the guys that got picked on in school for liking Dungeons and Dragons. Music and posturing obviously go hand in hand, but it feels way too fucking fake for us, so we don't. And yeah, we want to get across a depressive, bleak vibe, because it needs to compliment the music. The whole package has to be a tight fit.

As far as I see your lyrics are totally nihilistic. Can you tell me what is the inspiration to your lyrics? Are you really pissed of by life and mankind? Is your music some kind of valve for all your hate? Do you spread a message or is it even just a story you tell?

First and foremost I'm not gonna play the 'we hate humanity, all should die' card. Again, there's that metal posturing. We don't 'hate' anything. That word is bandied around time and time again. But we're fucking aggressive musically, so we need the aggression from the vocals as well. And to truly deliver aggressive vocals, we need to speak of themes that at the very least conjure up certain feelings and frustrations.

The album theme for 'Everything is Fire' is based on a quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, a loose outline would the idea of constant change, rather than chaos. Our environments at every level (ecological, political, social etc) provide no hard and fast truths, and we'll all roll through several grand paradigms in our lifetimes. So, the idea that we're taking from this is humankind's inability to rationalise and reason with this concept - every second human conflict fucks over ourselves or our wider environments purely because we as a species defy our sense of empathy and ability to see all sides to a story. So, yeah, it's partly true that there are hints of nihilism ('We Are Nil') but this is only from an objective standpoint, a critique on the arrogance of mankind. If we were to accept nihilism fully, I think we'd lose what it means for us to be human in the first place. We'd lose everything we enjoy. And as much as anyone says 'fuck mankind', at the end of the day, we're all far too complacent with what we've evolved into - humans take even our own existence for granted!

Musically I hear a lot of influences by Gorguts and Immolation. But next to those atmospheric, dissonant and technical aspects there are as well many influences from post-hardcore, sludge and doom. Sometimes you repeat a riff that often that it seems to become even more grinding than the riff would be itself. And there are a lot of contrasts within your dynamics. Some parts appear to be fragile and almost silent. But only a few seconds later there is a heavy wall of dissonant noise breaking someones neck! Where do you take your influences for a so widespread range of elements?

Yeah sure, those 2 bands are an un-doubtable influences in terms of their ability to absolutely crush the listener, yet they sit head-and-shoulders above the rest of the death metal genre in the sense that they don't just rely on high tempos and 'wow-factor' all of the time. Most of their completely dominating material is slow and on the verge of grooving. In terms of the dynamics you reference there, well a lot of that is outside influences - we love stuff like Bohren und der Club of Gore, Jakob, Jesu, Sigur Ros. Bands that do the heavy/soft thing impeccably like Cult of Luna, Isis, Neurosis, Mouth of the Architect are all worth a mention, but I definitely don't think that we take too many cues from these guys, just fans! And of course we seem to be getting the Deathspell Omega comparisons, which is great I guess, but we've never actively thought to put some 'Deathspell' in the sound. But all their material is solid fucking gold.

As said above are a lot of parts and elements in your music. Almost silent, fragile parts crush onto noisy walls of terror and here and there are some brutal breaks. The songs in total are very dark and evil. Is this a problem when you play live? I mean, most people on a concert want to have fun, drink beer and mosh a bit around. But if a band is too dissonant, dark or technical, either the atmosphere of the songs or the concert may suffer from it... Or am I wrong and your music works as well live as on CD?

I like to think we do good things live - we get a lot of good feedback about our performances. That's cool that people want to party and get wasted to bands, but we require the audience's full attention! For every mosh band out there, there surely has to be the bands that people just want to enjoy watching and listening to. My favourite live shows have been where I've been totally captivated watching a band, and just have the experience take over all your senses. Killer. So we're striving for something like this. And I don't think we're that dissonant/harsh. We invest a lot of time into making sure that everything is cohesive and flows really well, and mostly, is enjoyable to listen to.

I do not know your first album "Of Fracture and Failure". So there is a chance to make some advertising, convincing me to buy it, haha! Are there a lot of differences or improvements between your first and your recent album? If I totally love "Everything Is Fire" should I buy your debut?

Well, Of Fracture is in the same vein, a little less dynamic, and for the most part, a lot more over-the-top in terms of linear song structures. It's a pretty ruthless listen, not a lot of breathing space, we were really aiming to nail a claustrophobic vibe. But the later songs that we wrote on the album (Defaeco, Martyr of the Soil) could easily fit on Everything is Fire. I guess overall, the album is a transition between our demo material and where we are now, with a lot of experimentation with what we could do structure and rhythm-wise. Still quite dissonant, and for me, it's the first batch of material that feels like our own sound.

How would you describe the style of ULCERATE? Simply dark death metal? I mean, dark [...] metal has some negative reputation for me...

Well, if I've ever used that term in the past it's purely as a label to slot us into, but it doesn't really encompass everything we're about. That term probably suits bands like Incantation, Dead Congregation a little better. I hate labeling things like this because you always end up inventing bullshit terms to try and cover all bases. I'd just slap us with the 'unorthodox death metal' tag. Should do it! haha

Beside those well known and popular “dark death metal” bands Immolation and Gorguts, which interesting ambassadors of pure darkness can you advise to me and our readers? Are there some underground-tips you can recommend?

Well, the aforementioned Deathspell Omega is a must - as is Bohren und der Club of Gore. Our buds in The Amenta, Glorior Belli is great, Exmortem, Dead Congregation, Diocletian, Creeping, Portal, Monolith (ex-Ulcerate guitarist Mike Rothwell).

Jamie, thank you very much for your time and your answers. And even thank you much more for your incredible album “Everything Is Fire”! It is a really intelligent classic in your genre, whatever you'll call it, haha! Sorry, that this interview was rather short. But I hope this little advertising will give you some more attention from interested ears. The last words are yours, use them wisely, haha!

Thanks a lot Christian, appreciate your efforts, and I'm glad you like our work! All I can really say is if you're into death metal that is conscious of atmosphere in any way, you might want to check us out.

Cheers Jamie | Ulcerate

ulcerate-official.com
myspace.com/ulcerate
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candlelightrecords.co.uk