Third interview with Eugen and Andreas of Voidskald about "A Tribute To Our Mothers"

Date: 2008.11.22

• BELLVM GERITE: Voidskald just released their new album A Tribute To Our Mothers which consists of three Darkthrone covers and three Katharsis covers. First off, what is the title all about?
• Eugen: Yeah, that might have been an unwise choice in a way. Apparently some people actually believe that we were referring to our biological female parents in this tribute - but that is obviously not the case. The possibility that somebody might even think this never even crossed my mind until I found out about it. It is a tribute to our mothers in the sense of Darkthrone and Katharsis being our musical/artistic mothers. Around Under A Funeral Moon that is, the black heavy metal shit they (Darkthrone) are currently making is pretty boring. We are not big on ancestor worship and all that cryptotheist non-sense so don't go too deep into the biological mother aspect. Think of it as an uhm... memetic mother!
• BELLVM GERITE: I see. So what made you decide to make an entire album full of covers and why these bands, why these songs in particular?
• Andreas: As for albums full of covers - it's really not unheard of, many people have done that. Somebody actually accused of us "riding" the fame of these bands in a lame publicity stunt or something like that but the reason is a completely different one. You might have noticed that we never included any covers in our previous two albums. This is because they do not fit into the Voidskald ideology at all.
• Eugen: Andreas might be going a bit too far with the term "ideology" there but he does have a point. We thought it was contradictory to make albums which contain lyrics which openly promote atheism and war on supernaturalist unscientific backward beliefs and covers of songs which deal with satanism and racism and such... At this point I would like to emphasise that neither Andreas nor I embrace any satanist/theist/supernaturalist beliefs or racist ideology. In black metal the whole idea behind the satanism garbage is usually more of a rebellion against religion, Christianity in particular obviously. I find this in itself contradictory in either case, really, because theistic satanism is an equally supernaturalist belief and shares most of the basic properties of organised religions like Christianity. As for racism, well, this is not really a supernaturalist belief but most of their policies are based on overgeneralisation and xenophobic hysteria fueled by different sources. These people frequently promote "cultural isolationism", a euphemism for "race isolation" - the "keep to your own kind in its original place" attitude. I really don't see the point of this as it divides mankind into unnecessary groups and it also promotes hostility between them for no good reason. Race in the biological sense, as in sexually compatible inbreeding groups, does of course apply to the human species. It is a result of prolonged geographic isolation and evolutionary developments as a result of their environments and other sexual selection features. These barriers are of course being torn down by the modern technological achievements of mankind which allow us to travel safer and at much greater speeds. There obviously are characteristic physical differences between these vague human races. Racists believe that one race (usually their own) is inherently superior to others, for example. What exactly "better" is supposed to mean, varies. They assign properties like superior intellect and such to themselves. This is of course possible but I can't say I have made any decisive observations myself. "Intelligence" is such a vague concept anyways. I find the notion of "person X being good at Y" much more useful. People from weak social backgrounds usually end up being less "intelligent", as they call it, for example. This is not because financially poor people are genetically inferior but because their children usually are stimulated in different ways by their parents and on average they end up performing worse academically than their middleclass counterparts. Racists love to distort the lines between genetic factors and "soft"/social/environmental factors to support their views with misinterpreted "evidence".
• Andreas: What Eugen is trying to say: We simply covered these songs because these bands had a great musical influence on us. We apologise for the lyrics. We could have changed them but we didn't.
• Eugen: (laughs) I suppose. As for your question why we chose these songs in particular. As you might already know we're big fans of Darkthrone's Under A Funeral Moon. Natassja In Eternal Sleep is an amazing opener and it has been covered so many times and we have covered it before because we love the riffs and everything...except for the silly witch lovesong lyrics. That's pretty silly.
• Andreas: Agreed. Focus on the riffs! Good stuff. Simple but... dissonant and mesmerising!
• Eugen: We love covering songs which nobody has covered before so we moved on to Summer of the Diabolical Holocaust.
• Andreas: It was very interesting because half the song consists of noisy slides you can't hear for shit so I pretty much invented half the tabs, really. The internet is a great source of information but I failed to find any proper tabs for this one. Other people were probably scared off by this - I totally understand. Our "interpretation" of the song is probably largely false but we had a good time and it sounds remotely like the original, so whatever.
• Eugen: Over fjell og gjennom torner from Transilvanian Hunger has been covered many times before, too. I mainly wanted to do this one because of the Norwegian lyrics. I recently started teaching myself Norwegian for the sole purpose of writing Norwegian black metal lyrics and covering Norwegian black metal classics in a more authentic way (laughs). Yeah, I know it's silly but this one was a lot of fun. We had some Norwegian mates check my pronunciation and all. It's far from being at a native level and I get the vowel lengths and the melody and everything totally wrong but you don't notice it as much when you growl it into a microphone and add shit loads of reverb. I didn't realise until then that Darkthrone actually have lyrics which use racial slurs - quite to my disappointment due to aforementioned reasons. The archaic Norwegian word "blåmenn" literally means "blue men" but it really translates to "niggers". Anyways, a native Norwegian can probably quickly identify me as a non-native when they listen to that cover but it was worth it anyways.
• Andreas: Some Katharsis songs deal with silly "race war" themes and such, too, but we didn't cover any of those. Katharsis is furious raw dissonant black metal with an absolutely fascinating sound unlike any other band I can think of right now. We covered their old songs mostly because...well, they are easier to cover, really. I would have loved to cover Eden Below, Like Hail and Thornkings. Unluckily it is difficult for me to imitate those songs and the other ones simply were much less work. Other bands we considered for covers were Deathspell Omega, 1349 and even Clandestine Blaze. Deathspell Omega is extremely complex at times - I tried to tab some stuff from the Manifestations releases once but the result was unsatisfactory so I dropped that. 1349 is very difficult, too. I wanted to cover Manifest badly and I came up with a tab for only one guitar which sounds remotely like the original song but the problem is that I am unable to determine what guitar plays which and such inmidst all that buzzy noise of theirs. It appears that they didn't use panning for the guitars much so the left and the right guitar more or less play right over each other as far as I can tell. On the original Liberation recording that is. I checked out two live recordings of 1349 to get more info but the video quality was not good enough to tell anything from the movements of their fingers so I focused on the sound and I could tell some details at times I had not perceived before. It did not help much overall, though. I'd say I failed on that project, too, so I gave up. Maybe we'll record it one day for fun. We'll call it "Manifest (for one guitar)". (laughs)
• Eugen: A sound idea! As for Clandestine Blaze, this is technically simple to implement, I think. But after doing six songs we felt it was enough. 18 minutes are ok for an EP. Anything between 20 and 45 minutes is a kind of a fence-sitter to me, hah.
• BELLVM GERITE: So, what's next? Are you guys working on any new stuff yet? Another traditional Voidskald full length release maybe? Also, since you're famous for working at incredible speeds - how long did it take you to make this release?
• Eugen: We'll see about that. Currently we haven't planned a next release yet, we might just put the project on hold for now to continue working on other things. Writing and recording new music is frequently a spontaneous random decision. So I can definitely see it happen. It's not like anybody is begging us to make more stuff. Out of the 300-600 people who have ever heard our music none appear to be big fans (laughs).
• Andreas: I don't blame them.
• Eugen: Stop painting everything so black!
• Andreas: Give that man a pun award! We aren't going to make any Rolling Stones covers, in case you got that wrong.
• Eugen: Yeah, not going to happen. Whatever is going to happen to Voidskald and the crappy releases we have made so far, it felt good to plant a small atheist seed of hope inmidst all the supernaturalist non-sense in black metal lyrics. If it will even inspire one person not to imitate the Christian satanist non-sense for the 16000th time it was totally worth it.
• BELLVM GERITE: Stop being so self-deprecating. Thanks for taking the time! See you... soon, I hope.
• Andreas: My pleasure.
• Eugen: A few months, maybe.